Run to Win

Last week I got an email from Jeanne, who is an aerobics instructor. She was asking about one of the guys in her class and some pains that he has been having. If you have opinions or follow up questions then feel free to post in the comments below, and you can always email me about this topic or if you have any questions of your own that you would like me to answer.

This should probably go thru the website, but here it is anyway:

I had a member ask me today about pain in his legs and based on what he described and showed me, I think he has posterior shin splints. I suspect flat-footedness, but he also squats heavy and lifts heavy in general. He says the pain backs off after about a mile, but comes back. I think he said he ran about 8.5 on Sunday…

I told him ice for sure, which he is doing, and maybe some over the counter anti-inflammatory drugs and maybe 7-10 days of no running.

Any thoughts? Have you run into this before with any runners you know? Have you ever tried “arch-strapping”? I noticed that is a some-times cure for pain associated with flat-footedness.

I do think the guy is somewhat flat-footed.

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I had tendonitis in my knee 7 years ago. I also had a stress fracture. It was no fun, and I hope to avoid that ever happening again.

Unfortunately, it is not the most uncommon injury. Asafa Powell, who is currently the world record holder at 100 meters (pending Justin Gatlin’s appeal regarding steroid use), is out for the early season races this year. He has run 9.77 seconds a few times now, but he may not be able to race for another month or two. He is training at a low intensity, though.

“To put a time frame on it, it’s very difficult,” Asafa’s manager Paul Doyle said on Wednesday. “It could be in a matter of a week, or it could take five weeks.”

(Source: Asafa Powell News)

Ima asked me the following question in a comment on my article about running workouts:

Good morning,

I came across your website this morning and am interested in asking your advice. I have been out of running for a couple of years due to injury and am looking to get back into it. My goal is to go sub 16 minutes for a 5k, hopefully this fall. Do you think this is realistic and what would your training advice be? My last 5k was about a year ago with no training I ran just over 19 minutes.

Thanks!

I can not say off hand whether Ima is likely to run a sub 16 5k this Autumn, since I do not really have enough information and have never met Ima. As such, I will approach this in very general terms and extrapolate whether I think that I could do it under similar circumstances.
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Photo by Ian HamptonChicken is a game where two people rush at one another head on to see who will flinch first and rush off of the path. If neither person swerves out of the way, or they swerve in the same direction, there will be a collision. If you are a cyclist, runner, or other pedestrian then I highly recommend against trying to play chicken with an automobile. In fact, I recommend against the game anyway.

When you play chicken with an automobile, you will lose. If there is a collision, the passengers in the automobile have a thousand pounds or more of metal and plastic in which to cocoon themselves. You do not. If you and the car run into one another, you might dent it (or you might not) but the car will definitely dent you. If you swerve, then you wind up off of the road and you have lost. Try not to twist an ankle. If the car swerves, then they will hopefully avoid colliding with anything else. In my experience, though, the car will rarely swerve.

You may not have intentionally wanted to play chicken with the car. Maybe you just weren’t paying attention, and ran a little too far into the road. Or maybe visibility was poor, or the driver wasn’t paying attention. Just remember that no matter who is at fault, the runner will always lose.

At lunch time today, I played chicken with an automobile. Visibility was poor, but if you ignored the law requiring headlights with windshield wiper use then it was not so poor that headlights were required to see. None of the other drivers had any trouble picking out my bright yellow reflective jacket. The driver quite obviously had no idea that I was there, though. Between not paying attention to me, and tailgating the person in front of them, they did not see me until I jumped off of the road into the snow. They also decided to swerve, but had I not jumped they would have still hit me anyway. Thankfully, nobody was coming in the other direction at the time.

Nobody believes that they can get hit by a car until it has happened to them. This is one of the reasons that I never wear headphones when I run on public roads. I just can not afford the distraction and I am always going under the assumption that every car that I come upon is going to hit me. If you were smart, you would also operate under the same assumption. It could help you to save your life.

One of my newsletter articles specifically describes how I avoid getting hit by a car and the steps that I take when I go out for every run.

In a collaborative effort with Scott over at Straight to the Bar, we wrote about injuries for the month of November. This is the final article in the series. I will first explore why runners get injured, and then I will share some of the most common running injuries that you are likely to hear about or suffer.

Causes of Running Injuries

The vast majority of running related injuries are due to one of 3 things:

1. Poor biomechanics
2. Over training
3. Trauma

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In a collaborative effort with Scott over at Straight to the Bar, we we will be writing all about injuries for the month of November. You can expect a new article on the matter every week.

This week, Scott discusses common weight lifting injuries and provides links to places you can go to determine the best way to treat them.

Next week we will conclude the series with a run down of common running injuries.

I was recently sent a link to a new website with info about sport injuries. The website is called, appropriately enough, Sports Injury Info.

The website is in its infancy, but it certainly shows promise. There are still a few kinks to be worked out, and there are (as of this writing) only 13 articles available. The site will grow, however, and it has only been around for a few weeks.

Injuries are categoriezed in two ways. You can find injuries specific to your sport, and you can find injuries specific to a part of your body that happens to be hurting. There is also an alphabetized list of injuries that have articles written, but I imagine that this list will quickly grow to be unmanageable and might be moved to its own page rather than appearing on every page.

There is also the standard Google search bar, but because the website is so new it is not very useful. Google has not yet indexed many of the pages. You can follow updates to the site automatically by subscribing to the RSS Feed.

In a collaborative effort with Scott over at Straight to the Bar, we we will be writing all about injuries for the month of November. You can expect a new article on the matter every week.

This week I would like to explore whether or not you should self-diagnose your injuries, or whether you should go to visit a doctor. The largest determining factor are going to be what resources are available to you, followed by the perceived severity of your injury.
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