By Kyle Merber
August 2, 2023
Olli Hoare’s season came to an unfortunate end this past week. As great of a redemption story as his win at the Commonwealth Games was in 2022, the only way to truly gain closure on his early exit from last year’s World Championships would have been to return and earn that medal he is so clearly capable of.
There are a lot of injuries that occur in this sport and all are devastating. But as a regular Coffee Club listener who digests the ins and outs of the trio’s weekly banter, I have been sucked into actually caring about their performances, as well. (Except for Morgan, who once said he doesn’t care about mine.) In addition to being a great case study of supportive male friendship, their storytelling always leaves me invested in the outcome.
And when Olli shared that his season would come to an abrupt end just a few weeks before Budapest as a result of a sports hernia, it hit home for me personally. A sports hernia, which is also known as an athletic pubalgia, is different from a regular hernia where – not to get too technical here – your guts sort of pop out of you through a little hole in your muscles.
The way my doctor described a sports hernia is that where your adductors attach to the pubic bone is like the threading of a baseball, except the thread is no longer taut and is gradually coming undone.
I first started having adductor issues sometime in 2013. For some reason they just wouldn’t “fire” and it took me a year or so to identify the issues and come up with the activation prehab necessary to manage it. I carried a five-pound ankle weight with me on every trip and to each run. In 2016 things started to get worse occasionally after big speed sessions. But with a couple of days recovery before having to go again, I’d be able to muscle out another one.
In 2017, things admittedly got pretty bad, and I was taking a regular dosage of way too much Advil which certainly was not good for my liver. It did nothing to actually help the issue but still, in 2018, I was running some of the best workouts of my life. Then it came to an abrupt end. One day, I legitimately could no longer jog without being an insurmountable pain. After rehabbing for four months and seeing no improvement it was time to accept that the injury was too far gone to heal without going under the knife.
For the out-of-pocket cost of $15,000, I let this well-regarded surgeon go in and sew me up because there was a signed Marshawn Lynch jersey on his office wall. Since there was an economy of scale to do both sides at once, I took the up-sell. Now while I technically retired in 2020, we at the Lap Count consider the spring of 2018 the real end of my career. I got back under four minutes the following season and although I never really popped a big one again, I did eventually return to injury-free running.
This is not to scare Olli or his fans. This is a “Goofus and Gallant” moment where I want to highlight what I did wrong and point out what he did right. The decision to not run Worlds is 100% the right one, although I am certain it was a tough one to make. He likely could have run through the pain for three weeks, but at what cost? Selfishly, I don’t want another young miler cut down in his prime, crowding the newsletter market – I’ve seen what he can do as a media personality and I’m already hearing footsteps!
Without revealing the personal medical history of a dozen other runners, this injury is incredibly common in milers. One of the reasons middle-distance athletes get hurt so much is because we’re constantly lengthening and shortening our muscles and tendons. Balancing spiked up 200s in 23 with 90-mile weeks sends a confusing message to the old body, which is essentially: “hey, just be good at everything.”
It looks like Olli can avoid some of that misery long-term by not being a stubborn bastard like I was. The fact that he ran a personal best of 3:29.41 in Oslo during mid-June gives me optimism that this thing can get fixed. Remember when his OAC teammate Yared Nuguse didn’t line up for the Tokyo Olympics? The long play is often the best one.
Kyle Merber
After hanging up his spikes – but never his running shoes – Kyle pivoted to the media side of things, where he shares his enthusiasm, insights, and experiences with subscribers of The Lap Count newsletter, as well as viewers of CITIUS MAG live shows.
