Still Part of It: Staying Connected When You're Sidelined
Trail Notes | Injury & Recovery
the hardest part of injury is rarely the injury itself
Still Part of It.
Staying Connected When You're Sidelined.
Most injury advice is about the body. Rest this, load that gradually, watch for these signs before you return. That information matters, and it's well covered elsewhere.
What gets talked about far less is the part that has nothing to do with tissue healing: the strange isolation of being sidelined while everyone around you keeps training.
Trail Note · 01
The Disconnect Is Real, and It's Not Really About Running
For many runners, the hardest part of an injury isn't the injury itself. It's watching the group chat fill up with a Saturday long run you're not part of. It's scrolling past someone else's race photo from an event you were meant to run together.
This isn't vanity, and it isn't really about missing the exercise. Running communities function as a genuine source of social connection and identity for a lot of women, sometimes one of very few.
A 2025 review pooling 24 qualitative studies on athletic identity and injury found that in seventeen of them, injured athletes described a genuine loss of identity alongside helplessness, fear and anxiety, driven as much by withdrawal from their sport community as by the physical limitation itself.
Losing access to a running community, even temporarily, can register as a real loss.
Separate from, and sometimes larger than, the physical setback itself.
Trail Note · 02
You Don't Have to Earn Your Place Back
One thing worth saying plainly: nobody in this community is tracking who's currently running and who isn't. Membership here was never conditional on weekly mileage.
The runners who navigate an injury with the least isolation tend to be the ones who stay visible during it, not the ones who disappear until they can show up properly again.
The same 2025 review found that athletes who stayed engaged through some other role during injury, coaching, volunteering, showing up in a different capacity, were more likely to rebuild a sense of identity during the injury rather than only after it. Staying part of it, in whatever form is available, is not a consolation prize. It appears to be part of how injured athletes actually recover their sense of self.
Final Trail Note
Ways to Stay Connected That Have Nothing to Do With Running
A few practical ways to stay part of it while the running itself waits.
Four ways to stay part of it
Come to the group run anyway: Walking alongside, or meeting everyone at the coffee stop at the end, keeps the relationships going even when the kilometres can't.
Say it in the group, not just to your coach: Keeping an injury private, understandable as the instinct is, tends to deepen the isolation rather than protect against it.
Find the non-running thread: Strength sessions, mobility work, even just showing up to a social event, all count as staying part of it.
Let it be hard without needing to perform positivity about it: Some runners feel philosophical about time off. Others find it genuinely difficult, even knowing rationally it's temporary. Both are reasonable responses.
The return to running is one part of an injury. The return to feeling like part of this community doesn't have to wait for it.
Research informing this Trail Note
Liu, Noh & Kim (2025), Athletic identity and sport injury: a systematic review and meta-aggregation. BMC Psychology, 14, Article 111.
you don't have to be running to belong here
Written by the Her Trails coaching team
Trail Notes are evidence-informed coaching journals written for women who train, race and run on trails.
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