Pain

Pain is pain, right? It’s your body’s way of telling you something is wrong, that it’s time to stop running and treat that niggle, or injury, or whatever you want to call it. But a new science of pain is emerging that could revolutionise the way we view and respond to running injuries, and seriously reduce the amount of time we have to spend on the sidelines.
 

- Sam Murphy

ONE WINTER, MY HIP STARTED TO HURT WHEN I RAN. FLEETINGLY AT FIRST, BUT SOON THE PAIN UNPACKED ITS BAGS AND SETTLED IN. IT’S HARD TO DESCRIBE EXACTLY WHERE IT HURT – SOMEWHERE DEEP INSIDE THAT I COULDN’T TOUCH. SOMETIMES IT WAS RAW AND INTENSE, SOMETIMES QUIETLY SMOULDERING, BUT IT WAS NEVER TRULY ABSENT.

The physio blamed slipping and sliding on muddy trails, told me to lay off running, and gave me exercises to stretch and strengthen the surrounding muscles. But nothing – rest, massage, exercises – helped.

Days became weeks and I limped around miserably, picturing the inside of my hip joint like one of those telephone-exchange cabinets you sometimes see open in the street – the tangled mass of wires representing the frayed muscle fibres and throbbing nerves I imagined were there.

Eventually I forked out for an MRI and braced myself for the results. The damage? None. I was astonished. Richmond Stace was not. He’s a physiotherapist who specialises in treating pain (specialistpainphysio.com). “Pain is a perception. It’s not bound to anything physical,” he says.

It’s hard to get your head around the notion that the pain you’re feeling isn’t directly caused by – and proportionate to – damage within the tissues, but experiences such as mine have been replicated in many studies, showing that not only can pain exist where there is no tissue damage, but that tissue damage can be present without pain.

In one study, MRI scans of the knees of 44 subjects suffering no pain symptoms revealed meniscal degeneration or tears (damage to knee cartilage) in almost every case. Other research, published in the