You’ve been training for months, seeing progress and a little niggle seems to come from out of nowhere. A bit of lower back pain, a tightening calf, some pain underfoot when running. You ignore, as we all do, because you believe it should go away within the week, and shortly down the line, you’ve realized it isn’t a niggle anymore. You’re injured.
This is a story that stands the test of time for all athletes, whether they are elite or just starting out. In fact, 20-30% of gym goers and 60-80% of amateur runners get sidelined every year.
What could have started as a new pain with thrusters and an overhead press, was in fact tendon issues in the rotator cuff or shoulder impingement. What started as mild but persistent shin pain on easy runs was in fact the start of shin splints or stress fractures.
I am an injury prone athlete. At least once a year, one of two body parts end up in pain- my left achilles or my back. Two years ago, I had a partially ruptured achilles. After that it was sciatica. Right now, I have ended up with tendinopathy in my left glute. As a collegiate athlete, I was winding up with four stress fractures a year. I have handled each of those injuries differently, some better than others. The first few serious injuries I had, I felt alone and used partying as a way to cope with a lost season. It then became apathy in the belief I was never going to get better.
However, the longer I’ve been in sport, the more accepting I have become of my chronic back pain and the injuries that come with the process. I have learned to continue to train, on occasion continue to race and most importantly, how to be okay when it happens. Below are some of the key lessons I have learned when it comes to injury.
1. Injuries are Going to Happen, See them as an Opportunity
You cannot expect to train hard and not get injured once in a while. Whether it’s an over-use injury or a bad landing on a run, the likelihood is you are going to get hurt. However, over the past few years I have reframed how I see injury. Injuries are opportunities. Opportunities to get better at the things we had neglected, build strength in areas we often disregard and time we can use to really make sure our body is ready to take the load again.
2. Injuries Give us Perspective
One in three professional athletes experience depression when they become injured. It strips many of us of our identities, it instills a fear of what the future looks like and often pushes athletes into physical and social isolation. However, most of us are not full time professional athletes and when it comes to injuries, that can be a blessing.
Injuries remind us how lucky we are to have a world where other things matter to us. It can provide us more time to focus on friendships and relationships we may have neglected, that project at work we didn’t have time to finish, the creative hobby we didn’t have two nights a week to keep free. I often think of injury time as a way to make space for things rather than taking me away from the thing I love.
3. Injuries do not Mean you Stop Training
Many of us think injuries mean we have to stop doing what we love. This is wrong in almost most cases- I always say, train everything as long as it doesn’t violate healing.
A good coach will be able to guide you on how you can keep fit whilst recovering. For most of us when we can’t run, the bike becomes our aerobic best friend, often so much so we end up venturing into our first triathlon. Especially when the swim replaces our plyometric work. When the upper body is injured, we can work on our core, work on our lower body to maintain our CNS drive and keep our lean body mass intact. More often than not, many elite athletes come back to their sport with an even higher aerobic threshold having mixed up their training.
Injuries don’t also mean you have to stop psychological training. Keep that morning routine as much as possible, change your performance metrics to rehab metrics and show up in environments that you don’t want to be isolated from.
4. Injuries are Insights into the Things we Need to Work on all Year Round
Prevention is the biggest thing we all neglect because let’s face it, it’s much more fun to bash out a tempo then it is to roll your foot around on a lacrosse ball. However, aside from rehab and isolated exercises there are so many ways to work year round to make us less injury prone and much better athletes.
I know it’s boring but think about your sleep. In 2025, I was getting an average of six hours of sleep a night which is an appalling amount of sleep for an Elite 15 athlete. Of course, I was at huge risk for injury, with my Whoop consistently warning me that I was in the red.
Poor sleep increases the risk of injury by almost three-fold with slower tissue repair, higher rates of inflammation and delayed reaction times. Sleep quality matters just as much with your deep sleep being the main point of sleep where growth hormone is released and your tissues can repair. My resolution was finding a way to get in that extra hour or a nap if I needed to during the day.
If your budget allows, see the experts. Physios and osteopaths have become my best friend over the years, even if I only see them once every few months. I also make sure to get a sports massage during hard training blocks although this spend is much easier to swallow because well, who doesn’t love a massage.
One of the biggest things for me to do all year round is keeping tabs on my training volume. Injuries often come at the time your body is the most tired, when you have stacked multiple hard days next to each other and have ramped up your volume without time to adjust. This is what happened to me with my achilles injury. My friends were training for a marathon and I naturally adjusted my mileage so I could join them for longer runs and workouts. Sure enough, I was the one who got injured. You don’t need to be a strava warrior when it comes to mileage. Do what works best for you and learn to peak at the right time.
Finally, we all forget that stress, and by stress I mean mental load, plays a huge role in all of this. Our bodies cannot distinguish between physical stress and psychological stress and see them as pretty much the same thing. This means, the more anxious and stressed we are, the more disrupted our sleep gets, the more tension we carry, the more our cortisol spikes. My coach, George, often attributes my injuries to a combination of my work stress and my body, reminding me to push myself to relax more and spend more time doing the things that calm the body down.
My Current Injury Timeline
I have just received the results of my MRI to understand more about the chronic injury I have been battling with for the past six months. With my coach George and with the guidance of my physio, we have begun exploring ways to get me in shape to race in the next six weeks. I have made a huge effort to not look at the way other people are training, to not look at other people’s races and turn up to the line, proud to have got there by listening to my body.
For anyone who is injured right now, I’m going through this process with you.
Remember, Injuries are opportunities.
Learn from the HYROX CEO.
About the Author
Sophia Parvizi Wayne is a self proclaimed wellness anarchist. She is health-tech founder, elite 15 athlete, mental health advocate and does not shy away from having fun.
With a background in elite running, for the past decade sophia has been building companies to improve people’s lives. She is a Forbes 30 under 30 for Science and Technology, broke the open world record in Vienna last year and is currently building out a members club in London.
