Getting to the City to Surf start line in one piece

It’s around this time of year that many people begin their preparations for the City to Surf & the Sydney Running Festival. For most people knowing how many times to run each week, how far each run should be & how fast to run is often left to guess work or based on the recommendations of others. This post will help you prepare more effectively & safely by providing you with some proven guidelines for the first month of your training to ensure you get to the start line in in top shape & in one piece. As a physiotherapist, two of the major injuries I see around this time of year are stress fractures & shin pain. As someone who has dealt with these injuries personally over several years I feel I have become quite the expert on the topic. Our bones, just like our muscles, need time to adapt to any new training stimulus. As we do more training they get stronger but if we load them up too quickly the opposite happens & they weaken. If we continue pushing through with our training micro cracks begin to appear in the bone & before you know it you’ve got 6-8 weeks on the sideline without any running. It’s around this time of year that many people begin their preparations for the City to Surf & the Sydney Running Festival. For most people knowing how many times to run each week, how far each run should be & how fast to run is often left to guess work or based on the recommendations of others. This post will help you prepare more effectively & safely by providing you with some proven guidelines for the first month of your training to ensure you get to the start line in in top shape & in one piece. As a physiotherapist, two of the major injuries I see around this time of year are stress fractures & shin pain. As someone who has dealt with these injuries personally over several years I feel I have become quite the expert on the topic. Our bones, just like our muscles, need time to adapt to any new training stimulus. As we do more training they get stronger but if we load them up too quickly the opposite happens & they weaken. If we continue pushing through with our training micro cracks begin to appear in the bone & before you know it you’ve got 6-8 weeks on the sideline without any running. Bone injuries often sneak up on you & most people are unaware of a problem until it’s too late. When we go for a run or go to the gym our muscles will tell us how they’re feeling & we can then plan our training appropriately. However our bones don’t give us this immediate feedback & when we do start noticing some unusual soreness the bone has already got to the point where it needs a lengthy recovery period to repair. We’re forced to shelve those racing plans & left to lament a missed opportunity to show off the hard training we’ve done. The biggest risk factor for developing shin pain & stress fractures occurs in the first 4 weeks of training. People will often jump into their training too quickly & although they might not get injured immediately they place themselves at a much greater risk than someone who has been gradual with their build-up in those first 4 weeks. I often see people come into the clinic who have been training for 10-12 weeks without any problems. They haven’t dramatically changed their training the last few weeks leading up to the event & in fact some have reduced their training load to taper for the event. They can’t understand what‘s suddenly changed to cause them to get injured. However, often when I go back 10-12 weeks in my questioning about their training load & look at those first 4 weeks of running I see a sudden spike in their training volume & intensity. Why are those first 4 weeks so crucial? As mentioned earlier bone is like muscle & needs time to adapt to a stimulus to get stronger. In those first 4 weeks of running our muscles & bones are a lot softer then someone who has been running for several months. If we start training too intensely during this period then our muscles are unable to cope with the demands of the training & they begin to tighten up. If we continue to push through this soreness problems begin to occur. Because our bones are also trying to strengthen during this time the tighter muscles begin pulling on the bone & over time that continued traction on the bone causes micro cracks to occur & the dreaded diagnosis of the stress fracture. I’ve done lots of reading into stress fractures & how best to prevent them. What I’ve found interesting in my reading is that it’s not so much the volume of the training that causes the problem but the intensity of that volume. Bones really like low intensity weight bearing activity. When athletes are diagnosed with a stress fracture one device used to speed up healing time is a pulsed ultrasound machine. This machine sends a low intensity vibration into the bone. It seems unusual that we would want to cause vibrations into a bone that has a crack into it but because that vibration stimulus is low enough not to cause further impact on the bone it actually causes the bone to adapt to that stimulus & start repairing itself & getting stronger. What this means is that in the first 4 weeks of our training we should be making sure that some of our runs are very low intensity. Many people would be surprised at how slow some elite athletes do several of their runs each week. They barely break out of a shuffle. Not only does this help you recover from the previous hard training you’ve done but it also helps the bones & muscles to begin repairing themselves & getting stronger. I advise people who haven’t done any real running training to only do 2 hard sessions per week for the first 4 weeks. The rest of the running should be very easy. How easy? Slow enough that you can hold a conversation with someone if you’re running with them. If you can’t, slow down! Think of your body like a bank account. The training you do over the first 4 weeks is putting deposits into that bank account so that when you start training a lot harder later on in your preparation you’re able to take withdrawals from that account without going into debt. Training too hard those first 4 weeks puts you at risk of making too many withdrawals before you’ve put in enough deposits leading to bankruptcy – i.e. injury. In summary, I always strongly recommend that you are conservative those first 4 weeks. Use that time to gradually build your running volume & intensity. It will mean that in the following weeks leading up to the event you will be able to train that much harder & longer without breaking down.