Coping With Injury  Joe Mercer

I know plenty of younger orienteers with various ongoing injuries, but despite this I always thought that injury wouldn't really be something I would encounter until I became a slightly older orienteer, so when I got a pain in my knee about a month ago now I was quite disappointed, however I expected it to go away fairly quickly likely all the other knocks I had had previously.
It was quite strange really, I felt as though I was running really well, I had a great run at the British and a few days later I did a training run and felt fantastic. But then a few days later I did another run and my knee really hurt- I just didn't understand what had happened, so I stopped running and went to my GP as it was getting close to the JK and I really didn't want to miss that. The GP said as long as I could run through the pain of my knee I shouldn't do any permanent damage to it, so thought I'd give the JK a go and see how it was.
But my knee just kept hurting and I retired from day 1 and didn't even start day 2, at this point I was getting really down, mainly because I still had no idea what was wrong! But there was hope; Sue Stevens very kindly offered to get me into see the physiotherapist at Leeds General Infirmary so I went along a week later and managed to finally find out what was wrong. It seems my kneecap was in slightly in the wrong place and it was rubbing on the end of my thighbone, the physio gave me several exercises to fix this problem and hopefully I'm on the mend!
The main thing to remember if you do pick up an injury, (and hopefully you won't!) is that you shouldn't get too unhappy about it- there is nothing you can do about it, in many cases rest is the best cure. It is important however, if you are in the start squad, or going for selection for a summer tour, that you tell the selectors if your injury is going to prevent you from running in the selection races as they will be able to take this into account.