(30-04-2017, 08:29 PM)marathondan Wrote: (30-04-2017, 01:52 AM)Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man Wrote: The two best things I do which has helped enormously in avoiding injury is to not run on consecutive days, and to do a proper warm up and cool down before/after each run. It really does make a difference. I'm pretty confident too that compression skins aid recovery after a long or hard run.
Yep, never running on consecutive days has been my mantra for years. But these days it's that or nothing. Oddly, the sore leg feels a little better today, the day after putting 10 miles on it (technically 5 miles on that one and 5 on the other, I suppose). Hopefully it will run off, but otherwise a week off should do it.
And yes, I must go back to stretching, if I don't have the luxury of a rest day.
Do you warm up, stop and stretch before upping the effort? I just make sure the first 5 minutes are at low effort. And likewise, do you finish with low effort? I'm afraid I tend to finish with a sprint.
I don't do much stretching at all. My warm-up and cool-down is simply 15 minutes of brisk walking, which is pretty dull (especially the cool-down) but is far less so than stretching and which has made a world of difference. I do sometimes (well, perhaps quite often) stretch troublesome areas such as calfs and to a lesser extent hamstrings, but I find the risk of overdoing it too great. A brisk walk may not sound like much, but I've found that it makes a huge difference.
