Injury is a continuum, not a switch
Medium confidence
Injury is not simply on or off. In interviews, runners described five to nine steps between feeling fine and hurting enough to stop. Most of the time you sit somewhere in the middle, not at either end.
Why it works
Stress builds up in muscles and tendons and eases off again all the time. The point where a runner decides to call it an "injury" is a personal line, not a real edge, so the tissue underneath is really changing by degrees.
What it means in practice
Track symptoms with more shades than a simple injured/not-injured toggle. Help runners notice the early-warning steps before real pain sets in. And in customer-facing copy, talk about how the body feels right now rather than the injured/healthy binary.
The evidence
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Across 7 focus groups, 31 recreational runners described injury as a 9-level continuum, from injury-free to career-ending. They placed each level in four descriptor categories: physical, outcome (effect on running and daily life), psychological, and management. Runners trained through the lower levels of early signaling, niggles, and mild discomfort, and self-classified as "injured" only when they needed a healthcare consultation or had to stop running. Lacey and colleagues propose the continuum as a tool for injury surveillance and risk-factor research, and as a framework for teaching runners to self-manage lower-level symptoms.
n=31
Why we call confidence medium
In a 2023 qualitative study, Lacey interviewed 31 recreational runners and mapped a 9-level continuum, from "running smooth" through a range of symptom states to a time-loss injury. The interviews support the continuum framing well, but putting firm quantitative numbers on those levels is still ongoing.
Where it applies
Adult recreational runners.
Does not apply to: acute traumatic injuries (e.g., ankle sprain from a misstep) which are genuinely binary.
Plans that respect this
Plans that scored well on the rubric measures informed by this claim.
- 10-Week Run Your First 10k (3 days)
- 10-Week Run Your First 10k (4 days)
- 10-Week Run Your First Half Marathon (3 days)
- 10-Week Run Your First Half Marathon (4 days)
- 10-Week Sub-1:30 Half Marathon (4 days)
- 10-Week Sub-1:30 Half Marathon (5 days)
- 10-Week Sub-1:30 Half Marathon (6 days)
- 10-Week Sub-1:45 Half Marathon (4 days)
- 10-Week Sub-1:45 Half Marathon (5 days)
- 10-Week Sub-1:45 Half Marathon (6 days)
- 10-Week Sub-2 Half Marathon (3 days)
- 10-Week Sub-2 Half Marathon (4 days)
Last reviewed Apr 30, 2026. See how we score.