Daily Press presents The Riverwalk & 1/2 Marathon to take place Saturday, July 14. The article below is part of a training guide for people wanting to prepare for the 1/2 marathon. The Slimdown contestants and the public is invited to walk a 5k at the event. We hope that you will join us. For more information, please visit www.hbtevents.com
This is the first in a series of articles intended to help the novice or average fitness runner learn more about the most common causes of running injuries and their treatment. Running is a sport that places significant stresses on the human body. Each stride incurs ground reaction forces that are several times body weight. Many runners will suffer an injury that impacts practice or performance schedules, but, most of these injuries can be easily resolved with proper treatment and can be prevented with just a little knowledge and discipline.
Fitness is a broad term which in running athletes is usually measured as a timed distance. Running fitness is achieved through training, nutrition, skill development, and proper mental attitude. A more general definition of fitness would include mental and physical health and a functional capacity which results in an enjoyable quality of life. Most of us run because it makes us feel better and we enjoy a challenge.
Visualize for a moment a “dome” that encompasses the range of physical abilities that you possess at any point in time. Today, you can run a seven minute mile or bench press 250 pounds. These activities fall within your personal “dome.” You fall 15 feet and break a leg, you have suffered a supra-maximal stress, a force was applied to your bone that exceeded the physiologic limits of your “dome”. As a result of this injury, your “dome” immediately shrinks. You can’t run anymore, in fact, you can barely walk with crutches until the injury heals. During a training session, say a hard run or a one hour weight lifting session, our body endures a stress which causes some disruption of normal tissue structure. At the end of that workout, our capacity or “dome” temporarily shrinks from the fatigue of the exercise session but the loss is short lived. With proper rest, adaptation will occur and the body will get stronger or gain speed/ endurance. It is not the exercise that makes us stronger, it is the body’s adaptation or healing response that results in a period of supercompensation. With regular bouts of exercise interspersed with adequate rest or healing time, we will continue to improve and our physiologic capacity increases, the so-called “dome” enlarges and we can run faster or lift more weight. However, if we try to repeat an excessive level of exercise without an adequate period of recovery further small breakdowns will occur. These repetitive events pile up before the body has a chance to adapt, the tissue fails and an injury occurs. Conversely, if the exercise stress is too low then no adaptation occurs and we don’t improve our capacity. In other words, there is an optimal stress for achieving fitness improvement.
Injury that occurs as a result of inadequate rest and recovery is called overtraining. It can manifest as a painful nagging tendonitis or even major system dysfunction that affects mood and energy levels in day to day living. Too often, an athlete becomes impatient to gain faster improvement and rapidly increases workout mileage or intensity and then stubbornly ignores the warning signs until a major debilitating condition arises or he suffers a catastrophic failure such as a complete muscle or ligament tear and subsequently loses weeks or months of hard work. In elite runners, who often have tremendous pain tolerance and drive, these injuries can end Olympic dreams or setback gains for years.
The next article will cover some of the specific risk factors and causes of running injuries.
-David Surdyka, M.D.
