Week Four: Rubber, Meet My Friend the Road

It is time marathoners, one month into the class, where the proverbial rubber of running shoes begins to meet the proverbial road. The absract notion of "Hey I want to run a marathon!" has met the reality "&^%$#@!#@! I am training for a marathon."

Maybe now you get out of bed a little more slowly than you did in May. Perhaps it takes a few minutes of slow easy running to work out all the aches and pains before you can hit your normal easy tempo pace. That nagging pain in your knee is not getting worse, but it's not going away. Do you worry about this?

Well, I would. But you have to listen to your own body and make your own decisions. My rule of thumb is the sharper the pain, the more you need to be worried. But no matter how dull an ache may be, if you feel it for more than one run, it is time to take action.

Every savvy veteran marathoner is familiar with R.I.C.E. Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevate. Click here for a RICE-based website that has some things you can do at home for your knocks and dings.

So you have your savvy veteran marathoners doing RICE, and you have me, your lazy marathoner who does IRD, which is different than RICE. It is Ice, Recovery Days, and Doctor. Here's how me and my posse of aches and pains roll:

Ice I have many of those crinkly icy packs like they sell at Walgreen's. I have some at work and some at home. Whenever I bust one out, I make my wife or one of my co-workers act like they're Tommy Lee Jones and I'm Harrison Ford and we're in the back of a squad car, like at the end of The Fugitive

Oops. I digress. Anyway, about three times a day at work, I ice a different sore spot on my right leg, depending on the flavor of the day, regarding dull pain. Sure the half-life of my dress socks' elasticity suffers, but it is worth it. After my run, I also do my best to ice at least one sore spot within an hour of running.

Rest or Recovery Days Recovery days are huge. If your pains are particularly sharp, take a day or two off altogether and ice your sorrows away.

But if you can run, do so. But honor the recovery day. Many injuries can be avoided by simply making sure any runs you do on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and/or Sunday are laaaaaaaaaaaaaaid back. You're putting the easy back in easy tempo on this run. Count blades of grass as you go by. See if you can see it grow. Leave your watch at home. Time your run with a sundial.

I could go into the physiology as to why recovery days are vital, but it is kind of boring. So it will be a win-win if you just believe in recovery runs with blind faith. They should be a staple of your training.

Doctor If pain persists after resting and icing, OR if any pain is sharp and accompanied by a sudden onset (think pulled muscle), I go see my doctor. I go to a sports medicine doctor because these folks understand that running is a quality of life variable for me. So they will do their best to get me back to running, rather than simply telling me to stop running so much. Sure, all this running is why my leg hurts, but all this running also keeps me sane. Sports medicine doctors appreciate this.

And of course somewhere in there should be a letter A for ask one of your coaches. None of us are doctors, of course, but we've all experienced our share of injuries. So please remember this: not only do we welcome you to ask questions about your aches and pains, we encourage it. It can be very hard to sort which pains are manageable and which ones are your body telling you to back off. Hopefully we can all work together to sort all that out.

And there is one more way our abstract notion of running a marathon is becoming reality (at least those of you running TCM). All of our long runs will contain portions of the TCM course. We will highlight those at each run.

Happy trails.

-Mike N.