Coming back to running after a long layoff
Injury, work, a baby, winter, whatever it was. You have not run in months and you want to start again without ending up back here in three weeks.
Injury, work, a baby, winter, whatever it was. You have not run in months and you want to start again without ending up back here in three weeks.
The good news is that most comeback injuries are not bad luck. They are a load problem, and load problems are predictable.
Your heart comes back faster than your legs
This catches almost everyone. Cardiovascular fitness returns in a few weeks. Tendon and bone take months. So you feel fine, you are not out of breath, and you extend the run, and it is the tissue that has not caught up that gives way.
Assume your legs are further behind than your lungs, and let your legs set the pace of progression.
Start smaller than feels reasonable
If you have been off for three months or more, start with run-walk. Something like one minute of running, two of walking, twenty minutes total, three times a week. Yes, that will feel absurd if you used to run half marathons.
Build by extending the running intervals before you extend the total time. Once you are running twenty minutes continuously, then start adding distance, and add it to one run a week rather than all of them.
The old ten per cent rule is a rough guide rather than a law, but the principle holds: increase one variable at a time and give it two weeks before you increase again.
Run on consecutive days last
Order of operations for adding load: frequency of easy runs, then duration, then back-to-back days, then speed, then hills. Speed and hills are what most people add first because they are the fun part, and they are also the two that most reliably produce an achilles or a shin problem in a returning runner.
Normal soreness and not-normal soreness
Muscle soreness that is symmetrical, spread over an area, and gone in two days is normal.
Pain that is sharp, in one specific spot, worse the morning after, or worse as the run goes on is not. Bone pain in the shin or the foot that hurts to press on with one finger deserves attention that week, not next month.
Do some strength work
Two short sessions a week of calf raises, single leg work and something for the hips will do more to keep you running than any amount of stretching. Runners who lift get injured less. It is one of the clearer findings in the whole area, and it takes twenty minutes.
The Saturday group
We run a small return-to-running group on Saturday mornings for exactly this: people coming back from something, who would rather not guess. Six to eight people, an hour, and a plan you leave with.
If you would rather do it on your own, that is fine too. Start smaller than you want to, add one thing at a time, and get the niggle looked at while it is still a niggle.