Triathlon superstar Lionel Sanders moving again but taking it step by step in injury battle

Lionel Sanders believes he is still six to eight weeks away from running again as he plots his return to competitive action.

The 37-year-old Canadian has been sidelined with a gluteal issue, which he believes was caused by the diet-related condition known as Relative Energy Deficiency, or RED-S.

Unable to walk and fearing it could be a stress fracture of the sacrum, he stopped training completely for a period and pulled out of IRONMAN Lake Placid to focus on his recovery.

Caution over running

With the game plan still very much centred around him being able to compete in Nice for this year’s IRONMAN World Championship in September, Sanders is wary of pushing himself too hard, too soon, as he looks to ramp up the training.

Having already booked accommodation for pre-Lake Placid training, he has decamped his family from their Arizona base and taken them back to his home country of Canada, where he is already swimming and riding on the bike.

Speaking on his latest YouTube VLOG, which you can see embedded in this article below, he explained how running would very much be the key aspect of his recovery process due to the nature of the injury.

And he is determined not to push himself, even though he has started doing a little jogging in the park with his young son, Levi.

“I’m back swimming full tilt, and biking, I would say by next week I will be at full tilt,” he said. “I might be pushing it a little too quickly because it’s starting to be like I can’t really feel it anymore. I’m wanting to basically start running again, and I don’t think that’s a good idea.

“I’m at the park doing single-leg hopping and stuff. And I don’t know if this is the smartest idea. If you’re single-leg hopping, that means it’s moving. If you consider that 10 days ago, I couldn’t walk normally. That means it’s moving in the right direction quickly.

“It’ll be four weeks on Sunday (since he last ran), so that’s 25 days or so,” he said. “I could probably run now. Because I want to get back to it so fast, I’ve sort of been jogging around at the park with Levi. And, yeah, I could run right now. But will I be injured again tomorrow? There’s definitely a chance. I don’t think it’s healed enough to warrant putting on extreme weight.

“Running is a very high-weight bearing, explosive type of activity, so, not a good idea. So, I’m going to give it six weeks for sure. And if it needs eight, I’ll give it eight.”

Complex issue

The bigger picture for Sanders is how he now manages the cause of his injury, as he continues to seek advice on the issues related to RED-S – a condition which affects athletes when their energy intake is not high enough to meet the demands of their training and competing schedule.

Sanders, who started the season with impressive 70.3 wins at Oceanside and St George, had focused his entire campaign around building for another tilt at the World Championship title, and now his injury issues are threatening to derail that push.

“You should always listen to your body. I was able to catch this very early on, and I think the recovery is going to be about as quick as it can be,” he said. “The body doesn’t like to be injured. For you to get injured means that you’ve really missed the mark by a lot. Because the body has amazing compensatory mechanisms. The body will heal itself if you give it what it needs.

“RED-S is a complex topic because if it’s true that I have been underfueling, then there’s certainly a possibility that a lot of my problems have been due to underfueling. Have I thrown out eating healthy? Absolutely not. I mean, you should eat a balanced diet, and you should try to eat a lot of fruit and vegetables and whole foods.

“But you also need to be very cognisant that just as you can become nutrient deficient, you can also become energy deficient. And so you try to sleep over eight hours, and you train over four hours, and then try and fit 7,000 calories of eating in the middle, and see how much fruit, vegetables and whole grains you can eat.

“I wouldn’t say it’s impossible to eat that much fruit, vegetables and whole grains. But it would be pretty hard. If you’re gonna eat 7,000 a day and 60% of it’s going to come from carbs, where are you going to get all that carb from? I’m not gonna be able to do it eating nothing but white rice.”