With the Hackney Half marathon less than 4 weeks away, Osteopath and Sports and Exercise scientist Paddy Joyce shares his Top 5 tips on avoiding injury between now and then.
1. Be realistic – by this I mean set an achievable goal. It’s all too tempting to pick a target time that beats your previous personal best or dips under one of those nice round numbers! “I want to run a sub 2hrs”. However, if your training hasn’t gone quite to plan, perhaps you’ve picked up a niggle which has prevented you running for a couple of weeks, been busy with work, or commenced your training too late in the day, then it’s time to reassess your targets. It’s a good idea now to look back at your training runs, assess how they’ve gone and use these as a guide to pick a realistic target time. At Fix we have Running Coach Daz Red who can help advise you on this.
2. Don’t play catch up – missed some miles out from your training plan and want to play catch up? Now is not the time! Unfortunately, with just a few weeks left of training before the big day you’ve ran out of time. My advice now is to continue to slowly progressing your mileage up until around the 11th May. A rule of thumb may be to increase your weekly distance by around 10% (this can be more or less for different people). It would not be sensible now to try and cram in all those runs that you missed at the start of your training plan in the hope that this will miraculously get into shape for the big day. This is likely to lead to injury and/or fatigue for the day itself and will be detrimental.
3. Sleep/Recovery – don’t underestimate the importance of sleep/recovery! This is when many of the physiological changes from your training take place. A recent study found <7hrs of sleep, sustained for 14 days, increases risk of injury by 1.7 times (Huang et al 2021). This is even more necessary in these final weeks as you increase your mileage and do some of your longest runs. If you’ve had a particularly hard day of training it might also be necessary to have a rest day the day after, or perhaps a light recovery run to flush out some of those waste metabolites.
4. Taper – many of you will already know this but it’s a good idea that your training programme involves a taper. I would suggest a taper of anything between 2 weeks and 10 days for a ½ marathon. Your longest run should have been done by the 8th May and you should now be winding down the mileage and intensity of your training sessions. Carry on beyond this and you risk being fatigued or sustaining injury for the day itself.
5. Enjoyment –running has been shown to have wide ranging health benefits and contrary to popular belief it is not bad for your knees! The more you enjoy it the more likely you are to carry on, and this can only be beneficial. This harps back to being realistic on your goals. Set a unachievable race pace and the day is going to be hell! Set an achievable goal and you’ll love it. There will always be another ½ marathon to do so set a target you can achieve and perhaps the next ½ marathon you can beat your time!
