Episode 35: Interview with Brodie Sharpe-Physiotherapist, Founder & CEO of The Run Smarter Series
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Welcome to Chasing Life Podcast, where we talk about fitness, running, career, and life tips to inspire you to live your best life. I'm your host, Sarah Kane, and I hope you enjoy today's episode.

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Welcome to another episode of Chasing Life. I'm your host, Sarah, and today's guest is Brody Sharp. Brody is a licensed physiotherapist in Australia and is a runner passionate about helping runners. After working on his own injury, he realized he could help runners worldwide get back to what they love doing most. He has spent years helping hundreds of runners feel confident in running again, providing evidence-based information to help with current injuries and sharing critical information to reduce the likelihood of future injuries.

The runner's life isn't easy, but Brody believes that with the right tools, education, and a good guide, it can be one of the most rewarding ways to stay in shape and move through life. During this episode, we talk about four principles to overcome any injury, tips on how to incorporate cross-training into your routine, his mission that inspired him to create the Run Smarter podcast, and what Chasing Life means to him. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Hi, Brody. Welcome to Chasing Life podcast.

Thanks, Sarah. Thanks for having me on. I'm really excited to talk to you today. Not only do you have your own podcast, but you're also a physical therapist. Can you kind of talk how you ended up in that career field and what you love about it? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm from Australia, so we call them physiotherapists here. And I graduated in 2012, so almost 10 years out. And I

I think it was probably about two or three years into my physio career that I became a runner, just like recreational runner. And I was playing basketball prior to that. And when I gave up my basketball career and started running, I just had a love for it and then decided to kind of specialize or have this niche into treating runners. And along the way, I found there was a lot of running misconceptions and a lot of questions that runners had and

The topic of injury prevention and why runners are constantly injured, why it's hard for them to overcome injuries was a nice mission of mine to try and uncover. And so, yeah, that's sparked me on my, my physio career, my passion with treating runners. And then what we might talk about later is like the journey continues onto the podcast and using that as a, as a way to communicate to runners. Yeah, absolutely. So can you kind of talk about your mission?

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So the mission that I'm on is essentially to bring clarity and control to runners and when runners are injured or when they're trying to reduce their risk of injury,

they're met with a lot of contradictory information or just a lot of different things and are kind of overwhelmed with a lot of different things as well. And people say like when they're injured, they say ice, don't ice, stretch, don't stretch, run, don't run. And it's confusing. And it's just like, it's almost like information overload. And a lot of the information that's out there, like if you Google it straight away, the first things you'll come across

are rarely evidence-based. What the evidence actually shows isn't that sexy, flashy kind of stuff. And it doesn't really ripple into the consciousness of the runners. It's not usually the first thing they hear. And so it does get very confusing. So one of my first attempts at...

at helping runners was to release this podcast and I released like an ebook and the podcast, the first few episodes, along with the chapters of the ebook contained these 10 principles to overcome injury or just to serve my mission, to give people clarity and control when it comes to their running. And so I

Yeah, those principles one to 10 just have different topics, different chapters around. So by the end of all the 10 chapters, they have a better understanding of what the evidence is, like what it means when it comes to running injuries, why do runners get injured and what to do when they overcome injury.

Yeah, I was reading the book leading up to our episode and things started to make a lot more sense to me because I've been dealing with an overuse injury for about six months now. And it has to do with tendonitis in my ankle. And, you know, I tried to push through it and that just made it worse. And then...

Yeah, I'd stopped running for a while, but that, you know, it helped temporarily. And all of the pieces in your ebook really helped me to understand why that was happening, right? Of like, my tolerance was a lot lower for pain. And that's why I couldn't run the distances that I used to be able to. And

Over the last three months or so, I've been starting to build my endurance back up, but little by little and with the help of one of my best friends is a physical therapist. And so she gave me some exercises to help strengthen it, but also helped me to understand that in order for it to get better, you actually have to use it. But in

a kind of contained or unlimited fashion, because in order for it to get stronger again, you can't just stop using it. I'd love if you could maybe dive into a couple of the principles and maybe this is a huge benefit for me because I'm kind of dealing with the injury, but I hope that it will be very useful for other runners listening as well for preventing injury or if a

are dealing with one right now, how to best kind of cope with that. Yeah, absolutely. Before we dive into the principles, do you know which tendon it is in the foot? She diagnosed it as the posterior tibial tendon. So the interior of my ankle there. Yeah. Okay. Right. And could you...

Do you have any reason why it flared up? Was there any like training mishaps or anything at the moment of it being so? It started after I ran a marathon in a new PR time. So I think I had to do with...

I don't know, maybe just going at a faster pace for them. I've run two marathons prior to that one. Um, but I, maybe just a lead up, I had done more mileage leading up to that marathon. Um, at first, the first couple of days after the marathon, I just thought it was kind of general soreness and then it didn't go away after a few weeks. Um, and I would wake up in the morning, I could barely walk. And so it, it kind of got to the point where

where I had enough of enough. And then thankfully I,

I saw my friend and she gave me a PT session and was able to help me kind of pinpoint the issue. And I actually never even went to the doctor about it because I knew they were just going to tell me to stop running and I didn't want to hear that. So did you have like a change in shoes or anything at the time of the marathon? No, I maybe a month prior I had gotten a new pair, but I had logged, I don't probably remember

close to 80 or 100 miles leading up to the race by the time I ran in those shoes. And were they quite similar to the shoes you had in the past in terms of like support and weight and heel drop, that sort of thing? Yes, they were actually the same model.

And I did hear on, because I listened to your episode with Rachel and you mentioned that you had like flat feet in the past or that's something that you do have as well, which the tip post is responsible for controlling your pronation when you run. So usually you find when it comes to running injuries, when people say, oh, why did I get this injury?

It's usually due to that particular structure being overloaded, but also how someone would run as well. And so why someone develops an Achilles issue is

compared to why someone develops a knee issue is the like kind of how they're running but it's always almost always combined with a training error and so you could run if you as soon as you overdo things as soon as you do something that's a little bit too much it's most likely going to be the tip post tendon that's going to start flaring up or maybe a plantar fascia if you do have that susceptibility but

But yeah, it's just interesting, interesting for me to know. So I guess we should dive into these principles then. So I wanted to start with principle number one because it's number one for a reason. It's number one. It's the one that every runner needs to understand in order for the rest of them to make sense. And so the chapter one in my book and episode one of the podcast is adaptation education. It's trying my best to explain how

what adaptation is and why it's so important for runners. And I have this graph in the book, which I do describe. And it's essentially everyone, every structure, every tendon ligament muscle has a certain adaptation zone. And you load up your body to the point where you reach that adaptation zone. And if you do reach that adaptation zone and give it enough time to recover, then that structure becomes stronger. And if you do that enough times,

several times throughout the week, that adaptation zone starts to climb up and the capacity for that structure starts to elevate. You can under load your body. So if we're talking about like an Achilles tendon and you go for a five minute walk, yes, it is putting load through that Achilles tendon. But for most of us, that's not exceeding enough load to trigger adaptation. You're not going to get stronger going for a five minute walk.

But so that's where a couple of lines on the graph, but then we have overdoing it, which is exceeding that healthy adaptation zone. And you kind of get into this injury zone where it increases your risk of injury. And so if someone's used to doing say 50 Ks per week, and then all of a sudden they decide to do a hundred Ks per week, and they've changed their shoes to zero drop shoes, and they've decided to run a bit faster and they've decided to go up hills and

that puts tremendous load through the Achilles and would, for most people, exceed their adaptation zone. And so the Achilles will start getting sore and that's when injury will start to develop. And so it's just explaining this concept that your body, every individual component of your body all has different adaptation zones. And we want to make sure that when we're training,

that we respect this adaptation zone. We want to hit that adaptation zone often so that the body gets a lot stronger, but we want to make sure that we don't underdo things and we don't overdo things, which a lot of people will find when they're injured. They'll find that they'll look back on their last week and say, yeah, that was a bit silly. I probably shouldn't have run that fast. I wasn't feeling that great or that fresh. And I decided to go for that really long run. And so that can usually point out

or pick something that's made the difference or like the abrupt change because they could keep something quite consistent, but all of a sudden their terrain is an abrupt change or their shoe type is an abrupt change and something a bit too different that the body hasn't got used to yet. Yeah, I have tried to educate myself more on injuries since I've had one that it's been so long and it's really enlightening to hear of people

You know, it's just like one of those changes, right? You change the terrain you're running on or you change the speed or the distance. It's like all those factors could lead to an injury. It's been educational for me to say the least. And these are good things. Like, yeah, if you want to get faster, if you want to change your terrain, if you want to change your shoes, they're all good things that you can do.

But we just need to make sure that we allow enough time and we do so gradually enough that the body starts to recognize it, the body starts to adapt to it. And yeah, we just need to be patient, which often runners aren't. Right. Yeah. That's one of our downfalls for sure. Yeah. What's another principle? Principle number four, which I think you wanted to talk about a lot was the sleep on it. That's the title of the chapter and it's

educating people on observing pain over 24 hours, because there's often some misleading signals or people misinterpret a lot of their signals when it comes to pain and symptoms and injury and that sort of thing. Because especially for things like tendons, they could be undergoing a certain reaction and it could be a painful tendon, but people will find that once they warm up and once they go for a run for like 10 to 15 minutes,

that actual injury site starts to warm up and pain starts to reduce. And it could almost get to the point where it's pain-free depending on the state of the pathology. And so they can run for half an hour, 60 minutes without any pain. And they start to interpret this as, oh, running must be good for me. And then once they've cooled down there, they can start to feel it again. By the end of the day, they're like, yeah, I start to notice it. And then by the next morning, they're like, oh, it's so sore. It's so stiff. I don't know what happened. But then they go for a run again.

and it starts to warm up and you're thinking, oh, fantastic, you know, and interpreting this as running must be good for me. And then if the pathology gets a lot worse, then they don't have that same warmup effect, or maybe it only has a little effect where they can start to still notice it. It's still like a two or three out of 10 pain, but manageable during a run when it used to be pain-free. So slowly the progression of the pathology is getting worse, but this is why this principle is in here. It's trying to

to help people interpret these symptoms and why we need to observe pain over 24 hours. And it goes for a lot of injuries, stress fractures, another story, but for most injuries,

You need to subject your body to a certain amount of load. And then we need to take a step back and pay attention over 12 to 24 hours to see if that load, if what you've currently subjected your body to has been tolerated. And if you get this hangover effect where you wake up the next morning and it's worse than the morning before, it means what you've done in that previous day has been too much. And this is often helpful for people because

how do you know whether a 5K run is fine or whether a 10K run is fine or a 5K run at a certain speed is fine. It's all about trial and error than just taking a step back and seeing how the body responds over that period of time.

And you can just treat it like a little experiment, see how it goes. And if it's fine, then you can try that for the rest of the week, or you can try a little bit more and see how things go. But obviously, if you wake up and it's stiff and it's sore and it's undergone an obvious reaction, you know, that's way too much. Take a couple of days off and then try again with some other loading, which is why having a running coach or having a physio is really nice to just guide them through the process and kind of give

give them additional options if symptoms do arise and they're like, oh, it's sore again. Don't know what's wrong. Don't know what my next step is. That's why it's really nice to have that management plan in place. Yeah. I specifically wanted to talk about that one because that was what I experienced when I was starting to get back. Well, first before I took some time off from running just to kind of build the strength up. But then when I slowly started getting back into it again, and I was trying to just do say like three miles straight and it

Found it was fine during the run. It was the next morning where I could barely walk. And so then it took me a few weeks of tracking the pain and realizing, okay, this isn't really getting better. So let me try some intervals. So I started mixing in walking and running and that helped at least me to, to get some miles in, but it reduced the impact. And so it took a

I don't want to say it like hurt my pride, but it was just like, I had to realize that it's okay to walk in order to come back

and be able to progressively increase that load. It kind of keeps the level of, okay, I did a minute and a half walking with say a 0.75 mile run. Okay, that worked fine this week. Let me shift one of those ratios. Since the beginning of March is when I just started running again consistently. So it's a long process, but thankfully there aren't any races too soon, or at least any big races that I feel pressure to have to come back sooner than expected.

really my body wants me to. So we do need to be patient as runners. Definitely. And what I like for some people is,

like write things down, write down the symptoms because a lot of people really struggle to remember like two to three days ago, what their pain was like when they first woke up. It's really hard to, to get that gauge. So writing things down that perhaps a pattern will start to emerge. Oh, every Tuesday is when it's worse. When I wake up in the morning, then you realize that the Sunday, Monday were like your speed sessions or, you know, something might pop up and, and,

Yeah, a lot of people really struggle just to remember what's happened in the last couple of days. And it takes a bit of probing, a couple of questions, exactly what's happened, because it might even be outside of running, like say for...

Tidpost or plantar fasciitis, like they could just be standing for a lot throughout the day or walking in bare feet throughout the day. And they're not really recognizing because they're like, I didn't run that day. Why is it so sore? Or I only went for a small run. Why is it so sore? And it's combining a whole bunch of different things. And so writing things down and potentially seeing a pattern week by week can be really nice for some runners.

Yeah, actually I took that advice and purchased my first running journal a few weeks ago for that exact reason of like, okay, I got to start to, you know, take note of what, what my run is, how did I feel the next day? And it's been nice to be able to say, okay, my, like, it's just a little bit each week that my ankle is getting a little bit better. I'm waking up in the morning and it's not as

painful as the previous week's runs. And so it's very minor, but each week, at least I'm not almost collapsing when I step out of bed in the morning, which is what was happening. So that's why I found that principle. I could connect with it, right? I went through that and, and

And now it makes a lot more sense to me because I've been through it. So thank you for that. Do you have a third principle to share with our listeners? I think that that will really tie in nicely with what we've already discussed is principle number eight that I have, and it's called rest, not always best, um, avoiding the pain, rest, weakness, downward spiral. And it's something that I constantly educate people on. I constantly educate my clients on and mentioned in the podcast as well. And, um,

there's this concept, what we call pain, rest, weakness, downward spiral. And it's usually when someone is injured, their approach to their injury and their story as the injury continues for weeks and months and months. And let me talk you through it. So let's just say someone gets injured. They get knee pain when they start running because they've done 10 Ks and they're only used to doing 5 Ks. The knee pain is really bothersome.

pain with running. And so what they decide to do is, okay, I'm injured. Let me take a week or two off. Let me just wait for that pain to subside and start to heal because the body does this amazing job of healing itself. And then let me get back into it once it's pain-free. And so they wait, they wait, you know, seven to 10 days.

pain is fine and then they get into like a six or seven k run pain comes back they think okay maybe i just need more time off maybe it's just not ready maybe the body needs to heal a bit more take another one to two weeks off and then they come back by three k's pain's coming back they're thinking what the hell's going on um the body's not doing a very good job of healing and

and they just follow this downward spiral. I say this a lot with plantar fasciitis as well, because it's one of those conditions that starts to affect daily life. Like it starts to impact their running, then it really impacts their running, then it starts to impact standing, walking, daily life, then any sort of standing, any sort of walking starts to produce pain. And so it really follows down this downward spiral until like

you know, the capacity for that structure to tolerate loads just so far diminished that yeah, it gets really, really tricky. And so what's happening here is when a structure becomes injured or when it becomes sensitive, inflamed, painful, the structure itself, that adaptation zone that we discussed before, that adaptation zone actually diminishes because it's undergoing some sort of reaction because there's some sensitivity to the tissues and

it won't respond to load like it used to. And so it actually becomes temporarily weaker, that adaptation zone drops. And so what we're doing when we're resting is we're actually making it weaker. We're not stimulating the structures enough to preserve any of the strength that we have or rebuild any of the strength that we have. We're just treating it with complete rest. So it becomes weaker. And so over that week rest, the structures then become weaker. The adaptation zone drops.

And so when we go back to running, we're actually unknowingly exceeding the adaptation zone again because we have this new temporarily weakened structure. And so when they say, when it flares up again, that's another reaction. That's more of that sensitivity. So then more temporarily weakened structures that adaptation zone drops again. And then we go back to the run, flares up.

we have another one or two weeks off weakens it again and so this pain rest weakness downward spiral continues and if you don't take this proactive approach or you don't have the right guide to follow you through this symptom you can fall you can find your way at the very bottom of that downward spiral and then once you are at the very bottom it's so hard to work your way back up and one of my jobs as a physio is try and catch people as soon as they start to have this pattern this behavior

catch them as early as we can and start working our way back up. How long does it usually take to help build someone back up or does it depend on the injury? Depends on the injury. Depends on how long they've had it for. Like I see people with three years of plantar fasciitis and they can't stand for five minutes. That's going to take a long time. But I have people who have also had knee pain for two weeks and they're wondering what they should do next. And everyone's

started in that that downward spiral it's how often how soon you can catch them but we can be proactive from day one we just need to find where that new adaptation zone is and then start training them within that adaptation zone because we know from our last principle all we need to do is a little experiment and then just see over 24 hours how how those symptoms are and we just want to make sure they're no worse than their previous uh couple of days and so

If we find that, we find that adaptation zone, then we're training them as often as we can within that adaptation zone, several times a week, sometimes daily. If it's a low grade exercise, sometimes multiple times a day and just trying to build up that adaptation zone and then start chasing that adaptation zone once they can start regaining a bit more strength and tolerate a bit more load and then see when

the load and stresses of running is now appropriate and get them into walk runs and then build their way back up.

A lot of people, when they're injured, they always ask me, when can I start running? What run can I do? Can I run for 30 minutes? Can I run for five minutes? Where am I at? I usually say start at somewhere that's an embarrassingly slow, embarrassingly low speed and just take it from there. It's just an experiment. You can go for like, I have a return to run program that I give to people and

And the very first stage of that return to run is they're doing a five minute walk. And then they're doing three rounds of running or jogging for one minute and then walking for one minute. And then they finished with a five minute walk. So all in all they're out for about, you know, 12 to 15 minutes, but in that 12 to 15 minutes, they're doing three minutes of jogging and walking.

It's usually embarrassingly slow and embarrassingly short. They're not too happy, but if they're fine by the next day, then we get to do a little bit more. And so this is where runners really get the behavior of runners can get really tricky because they want to just dive back in and they want to be, they're a little bit impatient. Sometimes they're a little bit stubborn and that's why so many runners are so injured and why they're injured for so long. It requires making sensible training decisions.

Oh, you know, the runner's mindset, at least that gives you job security because you know, runners will just keep getting... I've picked a good population. Yeah, definitely. Right, yeah.

Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing the principles so far. Do you have any additional ones that you wanted to share or do you want to talk about your podcast more? I think we'll go with your idea. I know you messaged me the other day around cross-training. You want to talk about that. So I think that might be the last one we chat about, which is principle number nine, the power of cross-training and

It's kind of different to once you are injured, like how definitely cross-training when you're injured can be super, super powerful, but it's also a powerful message if you're not injured and just wanting to prevent injuries, depending on the type of runner that you are. Because a lot of these injuries, like 90% of the running injuries that I see are due to overuse injuries. They're running related overuse injuries. And why we get overuse injuries is because we step over.

tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of times and put the same amount of load every single step through your body over and over and over again through the same repetition, through the same load. And the body will just spike like the loads requirements through particular structures will just spike. And that's why we're so susceptible to these overuse injuries. And so for a runner who's say injured like three to five or more times per year and

and you look at their training structure and they're training like five days a week, six days a week sometimes, for them, perhaps we remove one or two run days and actually replace it with some sort of cross training. And so that might be swimming, that might be cycling, it might be something like some sort of cardio that you enjoy, but it's differing up the loads requirements on the body. It's shifting the loads to somewhere else. So we're reducing the risk of that repetitive run

running related overuse injury, that constant repetition over and over and over again. So that's where it can be really, really nice. And doing some cycling or doing some swimming or elliptical or something that's different, still getting your heart pumping, still getting the blood flowing is really, really beneficial. And it's going to improve over the long run. And it

doesn't really make intuitive sense when we say if you remove some running sessions that will actually make you a better runner but it's what we see particularly with those athletes who are doing quite frequent runs throughout the week and they're constantly getting injured it's definitely there but if someone is injured finding the right type of cross training so that you can maintain preserve a lot of strength maintain a lot of cardio fitness that doesn't stir up their injuries

can be really nice as well. So if someone has plantar fasciitis, doing something like cycling, where we're not putting a lot of load through the feet, where we're not standing or putting your body weight through the feet can be really nice. And it can almost, it still works your glutes, still works your cardiovascular system, still works your quads. And you can preserve a lot of strength while you're undergoing or trying to manage this injury.

I actually turned to cycling when I couldn't run a few months ago. I was still trying to get some kind of workout in. And so I was glad I had a stationary bike set up. Nothing fancy, just a really cheap trainer, but it worked and it

at least kept me sane so that I could, and you could still get a really good workout on, on a bike. If you push yourself, you can do intervals on a bike, right? It was different for me, but I was grateful that I had that equipment that I could choose from. I had a, I'm just working with a client now who has proximal hamstring tendinopathy and she really struggles with her running. And I asked how's with cycling because sometimes

the cycling can stir up that tendon as well. But she said, no, cycling's fine. My husband has a setup in the garage. And so for cardio, I said like every second day, we can do a cardio session where she's actually on the bike doing some intense sessions because she didn't like it. I want to break it up a little bit. So every five to 10 minutes, she got off the bike and did some skipping, which is fine for that tendon. Skipping is great for runners because you're working your calves, Achilles feet, still building up that capacity. And she's just

alternating those two exercises. And she actually messaged me the other day and said, she's starting to enjoy this cycling thing. And I'm like, yes, let's try and maybe keep this into your routine when you actually start running again, because it can be quite nice. And I've dabbled into a few triathlons. I'm like kind of a recreational triathlete. So I love cycling. I don't like swimming as much, but I do like having the options there. Just if an injury does arise in my body, I've always got a lot of these other disciplines that I can keep going

active, I can still keep exercising every day, but it's just how I do it. Depending on the injury, I'll be like, oh, let me just do some slow bike, do some swims and then just go for go walking. Or yeah, it just depends on the injury, but you've got all these different things at your disposal and where people, where runners get really stuck is that they only love running. All they want to do is running. Running is like their mental release. It helps for good mental health. And then when they're injured and they can't do it,

That's when they really struggle because they don't have any alternatives. And the actual situation where they're really frustrated because they can't run and that frustration tends to manifest itself is actually detrimental to their recovery and their healing times as well. And so they're in this really stuck point where we say, how about you try some swimming? How about you try some cycling? How about some elliptical? And they just refuse to do it because all they want to do is run. So it can get quite tricky.

I like to incorporate some cross training because I feel like it helps one just to mix up my week so that I don't get kind of tight. I love running, but I also don't want to like do it so much that I kind of dreaded or hated or get bored with it. And so I run when I've trained for my marathons, I've run four days a week and then mix in cross training, um,

two or so other days. So I think that's like a nice balance. Yeah. That's why that topic particularly interested me just to kind of know, like, am I kind of doing the right things? Am I, you know, balancing it all? Do you find, especially with some of the

say popular fitness programs or other cross training, the Peloton bike or other activities, you find that some of those trends are detrimental to runners? They're only going to be detrimental if they overload

the body. Like if they do something that's exceeding their capacity, similar to why we get injured when we run. The last thing I want to do is to have someone cross train and then they get injured because of that cross training, or they start some gym exercise and they're injured because of the gym exercises. We always want to make sure that yes, you're running has a certain adaptation zone, but so does everything else that you do every other load that you put through your body.

And so people say, oh, you know, do you have F45 over there? F45 is like a, it's functional 45. It's like these gyms that pop up everywhere, especially in Australia. And it's just encapsulated everyone. This thing to that would be like a CrossFit gym in the US. They have workouts of the day and they could have really kind of high energy

Intensity level. Perfect example. So if you have like someone who says, oh, I heard like strength training is really good for runners. So let me start some CrossFit. And then instead, if they are injured and instead they do CrossFit, it's

four times a week when they're not used to doing anything, then they're going to be at risk of getting some knee, hip issues, back issues, all that sort of thing. I know I tried doing some CrossFit for, I ended up doing CrossFit for about two years, but I started really slow because I hadn't done any of those lifts before. I was just doing empty bar for so long, just getting used to it because I recognized that

I haven't done this before. This is something extremely new. I don't want to get injured. So let me start slow and let me build up. But especially in those gyms, especially in that sort of competition style where you

your ego is at risk and you're competing against someone else next to you. And the instructors are really encouraging you to push, push, push. Let's keep going. If your body isn't used to it, it's going to break down. It's going to get injured. It's the same with running. It's the same with any other load that goes through your body. So when you're talking about risks or consequences, that'd be my only advice. Make sure you start in a

environment that you're familiar with or that you know that you can tolerate and then just slowly build up from there. Thank you for that. I think that's very helpful. And

similar to running is maybe keeping track of the weights that you're using too, and not like lifting too heavy and slowly progressing up to there or how much time you spend on the bike and those sorts of things. So it's tricky because similar to running, you can't just say weekly mileage. This is my weekly mileage list. Make sure I don't deviate too much because there's so many different things in there. There's terrain, there's effort, there's speed, there's like uphill, downhill, you

There's so many different factors in there and the same can be said for cycling. Same could be said for gym. You've got your sets, your reps, your weights, the intensity, how much rest you have in between those sets, how quick your contraction phase is. Are you doing slow eccentrics and fast up? Like what's,

Yeah, there's a lot of different components that could overload your body and down on paper, it looks totally fine just because you're not looking at all those aspects. But that's why I guess when I'm seeing a lot of clients, I really delve into the particulars, especially if something doesn't make sense, then we really start to do a deep dive. We start to look at sleep. We start to look at stress. We start to look at nutrition, other aspects that we might be missing. And so, yeah, it can be puzzling, but a lot of the time,

it does make sense. A lot of the time you can just lay it out on paper and say, this is what you've done wrong. This is what we need to do. And then come up with a plan there. Which makes sense. The questions when you were asked about my injury, you're like, did something change beforehand? What shoes did you change the terrain? And so thank you for kind of, you know, using me as an example. Which makes sense to me. Like, yeah. If we're talking about things that are simple, you said, okay, I ran a marathon and I ran a PB, which we know if you increase speed,

increases like a lot of demand on the body. And so if you've increased speed, but then it's been a marathon as well, then that could tip you over the edge. The rest of the body's felt fine, except that tip post has been the only thing that's ticked it over the edge and makes a lot of sense in my eyes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just hoping that when I build myself back up to that, that I'll be able to run a marathon again, but just taking it slow, um,

That's it. Be patient. Thank you so much for those tips. And I'll link in the show notes where our listeners can find the rest of the principles and your book and check out some of your podcast episodes. How long ago did you start your podcast? And who's been one of your favorite guests that you've had? I started early.

2020. So we're probably about a year and a half in my, I've had a lot of favorite guests, J.F. Esculier, who no one knows of. He's a French Canadian who was one of my very first mentors to teach me like most of these principles that I know now, he was the first guru that actually sat down in a workshop in New Zealand and listened to him give this presentation and

And a lot of these misconceptions, a lot of these confusions that runners had were just busted in that two-day seminar. And so he's like a big mentor of mine that I follow. And so I had him on the podcast. Our topic was what's the right type of shoe for you? And he is very well-versed in the research that's out there and very well-versed in a lot of the

marketing ploys and misconceptions that are out there when it comes to purchasing shoes. And so that was one of my top interviews.

That's cool. I'll definitely check that one out myself and link it for other listeners to learn something too. It says, I feel like, you know, there's so many things to learn in running, but you also want to make sure that it comes from a reliable source as well. One last question for you is the namesake of my podcast is what does chasing life mean to you? For me, it's driving.

Doing something you love every day and making sure that it brings value to others. I think finding a mission, the mission that I'm on really taps in well for me. It's something I love doing. It's something I've seen a lot of benefits with doing and it's something I do every day. Like I do, I release podcasts quite frequently. I do blogs, I do posts, I do interviews, appear on other podcasts like this and talk about this sort of stuff. And it just gives me so much passion. And so like,

following something that you're really truly aligned with and that also helps bring value to a lot of other people that you care about is what I like doing every day. And I reckon that's my chasing life statement. Oh, thank you. Yeah. You can definitely tell when people have passion for what they talk about. It's come through in your episodes and I appreciate your time today. Is there anything else you'd like to share that we didn't cover? I guess just quickly, like if someone is thinking that they're not

destined to be a runner, if they're told they have flat feet, if they're told that they're too tight, if they're told that their glutes aren't firing, make sure that you try not to hold that as a conviction. A lot of runners are told these sort of things. They're told their feet are too flat or they'll never be a runner because X, Y, Z. As soon as you do exceed that capacity, an injury might happen and that might happen at that fault, whether at the glutes or at the ankle or at the foot. But if you pay

Pay attention to this adaptation zone. If you just make sure that everything's well-structured and that your plan's well-structured and you do make sensible training decisions, any runner can adapt to being a runner. So don't let anyone else convince you otherwise.

Thank you. I love that closing statement of yours. Now I will link to your podcast, but how else can people find you, follow you and get more tips from you? I'm pretty active on Instagram. So at Run Smarter Series is my handle. It's where I let people know about episode releases or blogs or research posts, those sort of things. I'm pretty active on there.

They can also go into the Facebook podcast group. So if they just search the podcast title, that will pop up there. Usually where I spend most of the time, most of my energy releasing content. Well, thank you. I hope that people enjoy your content as much as I do. And I appreciate your time. So thank you for joining me. Thanks, Sarah. I had a lot of fun.

For more information about Brody's Run Smarter series courses, the ebook on principles to overcome any injury, his blog post, and a link to his podcast, download the Run Smarter app. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it on social media. Tag me at SarahChasingLife or at Chasing Life Podcast. If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe and rate this podcast. That helps me to reach more listeners.