Running Correctives

With any endurance sport there is always a risk for overuse injuries and injury prevention is critical as nothing will impact training for an event more than not being able to do it because of an injury. Doing a few thousand feet of downhills each week has the potential to become such an overuse injury for me.  I’ve been more conscious of my form and have tried to make a conscious effort to always maintain good posture and to lessen the amount I sit which has helped, but there is always room to do more. Because of my success with alleviating some issues after reading Deskbound, I decided to check out Ready to Run which is also by Kelly Starret.  It provides a series of 12 recommendations to help keep runners injury free and improve longevity in the sport.  Many of the recommendations are simple to implement such as drinking more electrolytes to improve hydration or wearing zero drop shoes while others touch on warm up and mobility routines to address common running problems.  While some recommendations I already touch on (e.g. the couch stretch), I have not been doing them with the daily frequency recommended in the book. 

I’m going to start incorporating the recommendations in this book into my daily routine and finish out my last 2 weeks of the Tactical Barbell base building program. Once the base building phase wraps up, I intend to continue giving the recommendations in the book a try over the next couple of months but will probably put a temporary freeze on any major mileage increases until I give my body time to properly adjust to the downhill volume.  I will be picking a 10K or half marathon program with similar weekly mileages to what I am already doing and working on running those miles in an issue free manner.  I will be pairing this program with a strength program so I can continue to make improvements in that area as well.