174 | Coach Carrie Answers a Question on Coping with Feeling Left Out
Release Date: 05/28/2026
180 | 3 Top Mental Tips for Dealing With Injury from Coach Carrie This Season
The Injured Athletes Club
“ You already got hit with an arrow, right? You got hit with the first arrow. Don't hit yourself with another arrow. Don't contribute to your suffering by judging yourself and being mean to yourself and creating narratives that are unhelpful.” We’re wrapping up our ninth season, after 7.5 years of podcasting. Don’t worry—the Injured Athletes Club isn’t going anywhere. But we are taking our regularly scheduled podcasting break. To send you into the off-season, we’re going back over three of Coach Carrie's clips that co-host Cindy found most valuable this year....
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179 | Coach Carrie and Cindy Talk the Talk (Again)
The Injured Athletes Club
“It’s so important to pay attention to how you are talking to yourself, because your words influence everything. So you really need to understand your self-talk and start to dive into it a little bit and know, OK, is the way I’m talking to myself right now—is that helping me or is that actually hurting me?” Imagine you’re walking past two sets of coaches and athletes on the tennis court, track, or soccer pitch. One coach is yelling at an athlete for her poor performance, telling her it’s all her fault and she’ll never improve. The other is offering encouraging words, letting...
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178 | Coach Carrie Answers a Question on Dating While Recovering from Injury
The Injured Athletes Club
“How do you date as an injured athlete when you identify strongly with specific sports and are drawn to others who also do those things … but you can't do them at this time? It becomes a source of anxiety and insecurity. Like, who would want to date a fellow runner who can no longer run? Or someone who seems to be perpetually in physical rehab?”—Evan Navigating relationships can feel difficult as you’re riding the roller coaster of injury recovery, Coach Carrie explains in this week’s listener Q&A. And there are good reasons to consider not dating for a while: For...
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177 | Olympic Ski Jumper Matt Petri on Pivotal Moments and Controlling the Controllables
The Injured Athletes Club
“ I got to the bottom after that jump and I started having thoughts of—’I've come this far, it's all gonna slip away if I can't compete and do well in this competition.’ And as I walked across to the bottom of the jump to go back up the stairs, I basically said, ‘I'm not gonna let that happen.’” The first formative moment of Matt Petri’s ski jumping career was probably when a coach convinced him to try the sport, rather than pursuing only alpine skiing. At that point, the event went from the scariest thing he’d ever done to something he couldn’t wait to do...
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176 | Coach Carrie Answers a Question on Embracing Change as a Masters Athlete
The Injured Athletes Club
“How do I adjust my training mindset now that I'm a masters athlete? I have a hard time accepting that my body is no longer 20. I'm 35, about to turn 36.” —Kelly Society often tells us that getting older is something to be feared and refused—think about the concept of anti-aging. For athletes, there’s an added layer of performance changes as we move into the masters categories. The problem, Coach Carrie says in this week’s Q&A episode, is that aging isn’t an optional activity. By fighting against its reality, we often keep ourselves miserable and stuck. If...
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175 | Elite Bench Presser Tony Carlino on Resilience, Recovery, and Raising the Bar
The Injured Athletes Club
“One thing that helped me—and I don't know if I really thought about doing this, I think I just did it when I was in the hospital—was just taking it a day at a time. Taking the day for what it is, not trying to look too far ahead. Obviously, you want to hit that goal of getting better, but take the day for what it is and what you can do that day.” As one of the world’s most accomplished equipped lifters, Tony Carlino is used to hoisting huge weights over his chest and on his back. But in 2019, he faced a challenge no gym session could have prepared him for: A bout...
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174 | Coach Carrie Answers a Question on Coping with Feeling Left Out
The Injured Athletes Club
“I’m feeling left out, although I know it’s not intentional. I joined a racing team this year, but have had to withdraw from several races already due to recovering from a bone stress injury. I did too much, too soon last year, and it finally caught me right after team training started—go figure! There’s another race this weekend that most of the team is running, and I’m always happy to support them, but it also sucks feeling like a wasted spot on the roster and not being able to attend any group runs or races while I’m recovering. Do you have any advice on handling...
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173 | Swimmer Lyn Jutronich on Surviving a Shark Attack and Moving Forward
The Injured Athletes Club
“ It's not going to be a linear journey, which is something that's been hard for me to wrap my head around. I have bad days and I have good days … I've had to learn that sometimes it's two steps forward, one step back.” Lyn Jutronich has been swimming since she was a child in the Chicago suburbs, and as an adult living near San Diego, she fell in love with the open water. But in November 2022, she experienced every swimmer’s worst nightmare when a juvenile great white shark attacked her. With help from her swimming partner, Lyn returned to shore. Her wounds healed in...
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172 | Coach Carrie Answers a Question on Pain Management and Recovery
The Injured Athletes Club
“I am nearly 8 months post-op after a femoral osteotomy to correct my knee. One of my biggest challenges is trying to figure out if my knee hurts because it ‘should’ as part of my recovery—or if it hurts because my body isn’t used to this level of training after 7 months of not doing much. Can you help?”—Aaron Sometimes, pain sends a clear signal to your brain that there’s tissue damage or danger. But when you’re recovering from an injury, those messages can get muddled, with an overactivated central nervous system firing off warnings even though there’s nothing...
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171 | Author and Athlete Dimity McDowell on the 27th Mile and Charting a New Path Forward
The Injured Athletes Club
“ You don't want to think about a friend dying or going through a divorce or anything like that—you kind of don't want to even put that energy in the world. Same thing with running. You don't want to think about what it looks like, but the reality is, most of us are going to have to think about that. Not everyone can stand on the podium at age 70.” Dimity McDowell was first on our back in 2022, when she’d just written a series of for (the late, great) Women’s Running magazine about what happens when you can’t run anymore. As she describes in her return...
info_outline“I’m feeling left out, although I know it’s not intentional. I joined a racing team this year, but have had to withdraw from several races already due to recovering from a bone stress injury. I did too much, too soon last year, and it finally caught me right after team training started—go figure!
There’s another race this weekend that most of the team is running, and I’m always happy to support them, but it also sucks feeling like a wasted spot on the roster and not being able to attend any group runs or races while I’m recovering. Do you have any advice on handling this?”
—Jacob
Even if your teammates are welcoming and supportive—which, Jacob told us in a follow-up message, his definitely are—it isn’t easy to feel a part of things when you’re sitting on the sidelines.
In this week’s listener Q&A, coach Carrie validates those feelings of anger, disappointment, and even guilt and shame. But as she reminds Jacob, being a good teammate is about far more than what you contribute to the race times or final scores.
While you’re healing, your role shifts from training and competition to taking care of your body. Often, there are ways to do that that deepen your connection rather than strain it—for instance, joining for the team warm-up, doing your rehab exercises alongside them at practice, or simply showing up to cheer and support when it counts.
Resources/links:
A huge thank you to LEVER Movement, the exclusive sponsor of season 9 of The Injured Athletes Club podcast! They’re the creators of the LEVER system, a portable, lightweight device that attaches to a treadmill to reduce your body weight. Use the code INJURED20 to get 20% off your purchase here.
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