runography

Unfortunately this year I won’t make the Edinburgh Marathon. My training was cut short through injury due to an overtight IT Band. I had been really looking forward to it and had raised a couple of hundred pounds for charity.

I remember sitting on the bus last year on my way to the relay drop off point and thinking John was crazy to be attempting the marathon. A year down the line I was hoping to do it myself. I’m not sure where to go from here, do I re-try for Inverness in October? Do I wait for a 2nd shot at Edinburgh next year? I’m going to get back into training and build up slowly, making sure I stretch out the IT Bands as much as possible.

My current target is the Glasgow 1/2 marathon in September, will try and beat last years time of 1:47:33… fingers crossed no more injuries.

Can’t shake off this injury problem at the moment, I have tried a number of runs and it keeps coming back. I had a weeks rest then ran 15 miles on my attempt at a 20 miler. Within a few miles I was getting pain, by the time I was at 12-13 miles it was very painful, I had to stop at 15 miles as I was doing almost 11min/mi at that point and not impressed. Should have been under 9min/mi.

I took another week off from running and tried again, this time I managed 10.5 miles, the first time I felt the pain was just under the 3 mile mark. When I was reaching the 10 mile mark I stopped to help and old lady through an underpass (seriously, she was too scared to go in because she’d been attacked there before, that was my good deed), when I started running again the pain was bad in my right leg and was slowing me down, I then felt the same pain starting on my left leg.

That was enough, one leg I can deal with, but both

Had a couple of sports massages and the like, I think my IT Band is getting stretched a bit, but not enough. I decided on Tuesday last week, 28th April, that my Marathon was over for this attempt. I’ve not run since, but did play football on Tuesday of this week, that seems to be fine and didn’t aggravate the problem. I’m wondering if the fact I had stopped playing football led in some way to the injury. The variety of movements on the field stretch the leg out a lot more than just running all the time. I have played 2 games this week and have decided to keep trying for the marathon and not to rule it out just yet. Ye-ha, or more fool me, one of the two.

I also managed to pick myself up a 2nd hand bike from Cycleography as he has recently upgraded his bike. I’m going to add a bit of cycling into my training and possibly even start commuting to work.

It’s around 10.5 miles each way, so should take about 30 mins to get into work, 10 mins more than the car, but a lot less of a pollutant. It’s been 10 years since I was out on a bike for any length of time. I bought a bike for cycling to Uni and lasted 3 days until it rained and put me off. I was also pretty unfit and overweight then, so that didn’t help backside comfort much. I’ll give it a go anyway.

That’s about all I have to talk about at the moment.

At last I have a chance to sit down and update the site. Folks following me on http://www.twitter.com/runography will have a good idea of my progress, for those reading the blog only, you probably thought I slipped off the face of the planet, or at least had given up on the idea of updating the site. The tweets were appearing on the rhs of the site, so that should have given a clue.

I’m into week 10 of the marathon training and things have been getting harder and harder. I had gotten up to an 18 mile run at the start of week 6. It was a hard run with the last 2 miles being harder than any I’d done previously but I was expecting this, I was upping the distance after all. The day after this my Gran passed away, we were very close and as you can imagine, this was a difficult time, it knocked my training off course for a bit, but she was proud that I was trying the marathon, so she’ll be glad I got back to training.

I had been due to do a 20 miler at the beginning of week 7, but switched this to the end of Week 7. I started off really well, feeling good. I covered the first 10 miles in a good time and was still feeling fairly good. By 13 miles though I was starting to feel my legs tightening up and by 15 miles my right knee was in real pain. I stopped at 16.5 miles and got picked up by Ann as I couldn’t make it home. At work a few days later I tried a 6 mile run and again got pain on my right knee, this time after only 3.5 miles. I decided to book an appointment with a Physio, having never visited a Physio before this was new territory for me.

The Physio (Jon Trevena, based at Esporta in Hamilton, Scotland for my international readers), diagnosed the issue as being caused by having tight I.T. Bands whatever they are! Well I know now anyway — I.T. Bands ( Iliotibial Bands ) is a thick band of fibrous tissue that runs down the outside of the leg. If this is too tight then it can cause friction with the knee joints and become inflamed and painful. The treatment, lots of stretching (a modified Thomas Test) to try and lenghten the I.T. Bands.

Long story short, I’m still suffering pain from this, my run on Saturday was supposed to be 16miles, but 5 miles in and the pain returned, I ran on it for another 3 miles and had to quit, too sore. I limped around for the rest of the day. It’s annoying as my cardio training was going well, but if my leg is knackered I can’t do much about it.

I visited Achilles Heal today, a specialist running shop in Glasgow, to get my running style analysed and to check if my shoes could be contributing to this. After 45 minutes of analysis including a few stints on the treadmill with video analysis they reckon my shoes are fine for my style of running, so I don’t need to buy a different type, but I could benefit from Sports Massage, which would break down the I.T.Band fibers and make it easier to lengthen it when stretching. I’ve booked myself in for this, can’t be giving up on the marathon training at this stage, only  6 weeks to go and I want to give it my best shot.

Now I’m worried about the pain, these Sports Masseurs don’t mess about, in fact they asked me if I was prepared to cry I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow am.