Almost never bad luck. A specific, traceable factor — most often your own injury history, a recent jump in load, or too little recovery — is usually behind it, and once you find which one, it stops feeling random.
I hear this one a lot, usually from runners who feel like they’re doing everything right and still keep getting hurt, while a training partner on the exact same programme sails through unscathed. It feels unfair, because in a sense it is — you and they aren’t starting from the same place, even if the sessions on paper look identical.
“Why me” rarely has one tidy answer. But the research into running injuries does point to a small number of factors that turn up again and again in the runners who get hurt more often than others — and most of them are things you can actually check.
The single strongest predictor: your own history
If there’s one factor with the most consistent evidence behind it, it’s this: having been injured before is the strongest known predictor of getting injured again, often in the same spot or nearby. That’s one of the more reliable findings in running injury research, and in my experience it holds up in clinic too.
It isn’t because the old injury left lasting harm behind. It’s because whatever originally reduced that area’s capacity — weakness, a change in how you were loading it, a gap in training — has a habit of reasserting itself unless it’s specifically rebuilt, rather than just rested through and forgotten about.
What else tips things over
Beyond history, a handful of other things show up again and again when I dig into a runner’s last few months:
Worth checking
- A recent jump in volume or intensity. A new training block, a race build-up, better weather tempting you into extra miles.
- Returning too soon or too fast. After a break, illness or holiday, your capacity has dropped even if your fitness feels fine.
- Little or no strength work. Particularly calves, hips and glutes — there’s reasonable evidence this reduces injury risk in runners.
- Life load stacking up. Poor sleep, high stress, under-fuelling — all on top of a training plan that hasn’t changed to match.
- Rest days quietly disappearing. Often over several weeks, so it doesn’t feel like a decision at the time.
Why it can feel completely random
It looks random because injuries are usually a slow build with a sudden ending. Everything feels fine, then one run it doesn’t. But the run where it started hurting is rarely the cause — it’s the run where a few weeks of accumulated load finally caught up with a tissue that was already running low on capacity.
Two runners can do an identical session and get a completely different result, because their starting capacity was different going in. That’s not a flaw in you. It’s just why comparing yourself to a training partner rarely tells you anything useful.
What to check this week
Look at your last month rather than your last run. Has your history flagged a repeat offender — the same calf, the same knee, the same hip? Has volume, intensity or life stress crept up while rest stayed the same? Has strength work quietly dropped off the list? Usually one of those stands out once you actually sit down and look.
And whatever you find, it’s worth saying plainly: needing to make a change doesn’t mean you did something wrong. Pain is very rarely a measure of damage — it’s your body flagging that the current balance between load and capacity needs adjusting, not evidence that you’ve broken something.
Keep getting the same injury and can’t work out why? An online assessment looks at your training history, your current load and your movement together, so you’re addressing the actual pattern rather than guessing again.
Run happy and injury free.
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