In my last post I wrote about all the running injuries I've dealt with. While I believe some blame lies on genetics, most of the blame is likely from training error.
The primary training error I've made is running too fast on my easy days. Often, way too fast. In and after college I blamed my coach for my running injuries. It may have been partially his fault — we didn't do much in the way of injury prevention exercises, but other things like static stretching before workouts were not well known to be harmful to performance.
But, another thing that contributed to my college injuries was doing my easy runs too hard. In fact, I did my "easy" runs with athletes far faster than I and would sometimes get dropped on a longer easy run, and my coach had nothing to do with that. In fact, I'm pretty sure he told us to run at a conversational pace, and I definitely wasn't conversing while trying to keep up with faster athletes.
My eyes opened to my overly-speedy training runs this year when I read the book "80/20: Run Faster and Race Stronger by Training Slower." The thesis of this book is that approximately 80% of training should be done at an easy pace. In a future post I'll explore how to determine that easy pace.
Another training error I've made is not doing enough core and strength exercises. I stayed pretty injury-free in high school, and I think part of that was because I weight lifted several times a week. I like to run, so when I've had time to work out in the past, I usually spent that entire time running rather than working on strength exercises.
Finally, I've increased my mileage too much in the past. That error is an older one as I'm much more conservative with my mileage increases now, but it's definitely contributed to past injuries.
In a future post I'll write about what I'm doing to prevent running injuries.
Stay healthy.
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