Running Injury Prevention

In a previous post, I wrote about my training errors that have led to running injuries. In this post, I'll outline how I plan to reduce my running injuries.

Looking at the list injuries I've had could make me depressed and think there's no hope for running injury-free. I've joked before that running is something I do between injuries. I've been to physical therapy quite a few times, and each time the PT recommends at least one exercise, and it's usually two and as many as four. If I did every PT exercise I've been prescribed for injury prevention, I would have daily sessions that last between forty-five and ninety minutes.

As I've mentioned previously, I've started a program called Foundation Training. The premise of the program is to improve functionality of the posterior chain to reduce or eliminate back pain (something I also deal with) and to improve daily activities and athletics. The FT Streaming service has exercises specific to running, and they seem to help. The amount of time spent on these exercises can be as short as eight minutes, so since I've started this program in March, I only missed a few days of doing a Foundation Training routine.

Along with Foundation Training, I've also been running significantly slower on my easy runs than I ever have. I'll explore that in more depth in a future post.

In addition to Foundation Training and running slower, I'm using three other injury prevention tools. First, I increased my weekly mileage at a painfully slow pace. Second, I started my running after a long break in March by running five minutes and walking five minutes. I slowly worked my way up and landed on taking one minute walk breaks every 15 minutes. I've now switched to walk breaks only on my longer runs. Honestly, I don't know if that's frequent enough to make a difference, but it doesn't seem to be hurting.Third, I've increased my running cadence.

I've been running injury-free since I started up my running again in April. Whether that's because of using run/walk, increasing my mileage slowly, slowing my easy runs, increasing my cadence, doing Foundation Training, or all of the above isn't clear.

Here's hoping I can continue injury-free running.