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Saturday, May 22, 2010

Mileage Build-up Injury Prevention

I'm becoming an expert on running injuries and injury prevention/ recovery. With my history of injuries I've had the opportunity to experiment with various recovery strategies. So far the best results in injury recovery have come from rest and icing for muscle inflammation injuries. When the first pain is experienced don't be a stubborn head but take a day or two off. These two days can't do much damage for any level of running. However, continuing for two days in the beginning stages of an injury can eventually retire you for several weeks.

How to prevent injuries depend on many factors such as your experience, weekly total distance, running surface, weather conditions, etc.

While in the building stages of your weekly mileage avoid or minimize hard interval training, hill training, and races longer than a half marathon. What you should do is create a mileage build-up schedule (before starting a marathon training schedule) , using recovery runs between tempo runs and long runs. You should be drinking lots of fluid during the mileage build-up stages to reduce strain on your circulatory systems, providing sufficient blood and nutrition to the working muscles. You should be increasing your weekly mileage by no more than ten percent, this also applies to your long runs.

Shoes Arrived

Finally my shoes arrived through the mail after sending back the first pair because they were too small. My old running shoes are a size 28.5 but apparently Nike is keeping a smaller standard then other shoe makers. They're bright red and a little lighter than the other pair.

But what is a fun about a fresh pair of running shoes without a good injury! As this is the story of my life that marathon running comes with a serious package of injuries. Well, I might have been pushing my mileage build-up a little too hard by including hill-training and tempo runs which put a lot of stress on my calves and Achilles tendon. I felt the pain coming on so I slowed down and reduced my running to zero for one week. With proper care in the form of RICE (rest ice compression elevation) with an addition of self massage to improve blood circulation. The pain became much less after four days and was almost gone on the fifth day and I started with light stretching and jumped on the bike for some aerobic exercise.

So one week after receiving my new Nike Zoom Speedcage2 +  I was able to carefully run an easy-run which felt very comfortable. So this week only easy running for about 20K in total with the addition of one and a half hour on my static bike.