Common Mistakes Runners Make.

I deal with runners on a daily basis. Some looking to get fitter and faster, some injured, some on the slow road to recovery. Over the years I have found that they typically make a number of daily mistakes that I have listed here.

1. Going overboard with electronic devices.

More and more research is going into the so called Strava Effect. Here is a typical scenario. You join up with Strava or Garmin Connect etc. You link up with some friends and follow some athletes that you admire. Soon their training loads make you feel inferior and so you start pushing yourself more and more until one of the three inevitable breakdowns happen, you either get injured, sick or psychologically burnt out.

Or, you go for a run, give it a good push and get told that you did your fastest 1 km that year. The next day you set out to try and improve your time, and you hit repeat the following day. Soon you hit the one of the three burnouts referenced above.

The other thing that I have noticed is my Facebook timeline fill at the end of the year with Strava reports. You’ve probably seen them. They tell you how far you have run and create an infographic that illustrates your last year. I have met runners who suddenly want to beat a friend at this and so decide that they need to run at least 50 km per week in order to better their friends annual mileage.

My first piece of advice would be to avoid these extremes. Don’t share your Strava or Garmin Connect data and quit watching others. I have seen athletes follow marathon or even Comrades Marathon winners in an attempt to replicate their mileages and then get themselves seriously injured. Two hundred-kilometre weeks are great for a small segment of the running population; however a large group of runners would just not have the physical strength to achieve this.

2. Impatience.

On the coaching side we feel very strongly about building a large aerobic base. This takes time, lots of time spent running slowly and even walking up some hills if necessary. We introduce some of the fun stuff later, hills, tempo and track, but never at the cost of a large aerobic base. Once the aerobic base is built, we keep adding on to that. A number of athletes will bow out of this process and return to old patterns and in so doing, fail to build their base.
Increase your training load by between 5 and 10% per week and you should have less than a 10% chance of injury. Increase your training load by 15% per week and you up your chance of injury to between 21 and 49%.
Give yourself time, follow the program, quit being impatient. You will get there.

3. Neglecting Strength Training.

By way of confession, I have been guilty of that. Give me a 7 hour training week and I used to run for all 7. Now I would put 3 x 20 minute strength sessions aside. 6 hours of running and 1 hour of strength training.

By the way, you are not going to suddenly bulk up if you do strength training while training as an endurance athlete. You will tone your muscles, but more importantly, you will increase both your endurance and speed capabilities while, at the same time making yourself less prone to injury.

4. Ignoring low heart rate training.

Nothing has caused more confusing in what we do at SBR Sport Individualized Coaching than low heart rate training. We have had people report that the best way of slowing as an athlete is to sign up with us. However, the evidence speaks for itself and we are seeing amazing performances from our athletes with way less injuries than on other training programs.

Simply put, when we go easy, we go easy. When we go hard, we go really hard and then on race day we get a pace somewhere in between.

I am convinced that it’s a runner’s ego that gets in the way of low heart rate training. We hate getting passed on the road while on a training run. If I am on a low heart rate training run and spot a runner coming up behind me my mind goes into complete turmoil. Everything in me wants to stop them overtaking. I understand your pain. But, remember, each training run has a specific purpose, fail to work the purpose and you simply layer the same run upon the same run and get the same result year after year.

5. Stretching too much or too little.

I can hear you groan as you read this. What is too much, what is too little?
These are my thoughts. Try and become more aware of your body. I stretch two to three times per week and all I do is quickly test each big muscle group. A calf stretch to the left might tell me that the muscle is relaxed and doesn’t need stretching. A calf stretch to the right might reveal a tighter than normal muscle and so I stretch that one.
It’s not rocket science. It’s simple and practical.

Here are my favourite stretching tips.
a. Only stretch tight muscles.
b. Stretch after a workout. Use dynamic warmup drills before intense workouts.
c. 5/10 in pain. You are trying to stretch the muscle gently.
d. 30 to 35 seconds per hold.
e. Do not make the mistake of assuming that injuries are cured if you stretch the painful area out. You might do more harm than good.

Hope that helps. See you out on the road, running with purpose with an injury free body. Click on this link if you want to find out more about the running and triathlon coaching service that we provide.

Regards,

Mike Roscoe.

Kinesiologist.