When I first started running, my brother gave me a few tips to prevent injury. I thought I’d pass them along, as I think they’ve helped me get this far without injury. These are in order of importantce:
- Go to a running speciatly store and get fitted for the proper kind of running shoes. A good running store will look at your feet, look at how you walk, ask you to stand on one foot, and some other stuff. Then they will offer you a few choices of what kind of shoes are best to correct any problem in your feet.
- only run every other day. This gives your body time to heal in between.
- only increase your mileage or intensity by 10% each week, and build in a platuea every 3rd or 4th week, (platuea = don’t increase at all that week).
- keep in mind that it takes a very long time for your joints (tendons and ligaments) to build strength. Much much longer than muscle or aerobic conditioning. So, you may feel like you can train more than 10% each week, but don’t do it!!!
- warm up before your runs by walking for 5 minutes first.
- be sure to stretch. The book my brother told me to get is this one: http://tinyurl.com/bs47m
Stretch after warming up and after the run. - consistency (sticking with it) is more imporant than speed or distance. Eventally, speed will come, but not for a long time.
- listen to your body. If you are in pain, you probalby over did it, so take a few days off for recovery. Use ice and advil if necessary. If the pain continues, go see a doctor, but find one that will support runners. (Most doctors will try to discourage you from running.)
- cross train. You can bike or swim on the days you can’t run. If you need to take time off from running, then you can bike or swim to keep your fitness level. For every day you skip working out, you lose 2 days of training (not fair!).
- don’t run on concrete (sidewalks). That is the hardest surface, and therefore worst for your joints. Asphalt (black top) is better. Groomed trails with a level surface are the best if you can find them. Also watch out for banked surfaces. Here’s a list of running surfaces, in order of best to worst: treadmill, unbanked track (like at a high school), soft smooth dirt trail, flat smooth grass, asphalt street or path, hard-packed dirt trail, concrete sidewalk or path, banked or cambered surface, hard sand beach, rough pot-holed dirt trail or grass.One other point about surface…switching from a soft surface like a treadmill or soft trail to the road is very hard on your joints. So, if you are planning to run a road race, you should probably train on the road.
- Keep your pace slow when starting out. You can do this by simply running as fast as you can while still being able to carry on a conversation. For me, this is not very fast. I do a mile in 13 or 14 minutes. Don’t worry about all the other stuff you might hear about, such as tempo runs, fartleks, interval training, etc, until you’ve worked up to a 5k. Then move onto that stuff.
Here is a site with more info about running injury free:
http://www.mcrrc.org/advice.php
Here is a great site with beginner run training programs:
http://www.beginnertriathlete.com/cms/article-detail.asp?articleid=24
Here’s a link to more run training programs (but these do not follow the “only run every other day” rule, so use with caution!):