Managing injuries as you build your training mileage for the Irish Life Dublin Marathon

So, you’re now into building up your training mileage. Regardless of whether you’re a complete beginner or veteran marathon runner the same principles will determine the progression of your training over the next few months. You’ll run a little more week on week, your long run will increase in distance, and if you’re doing some harder workouts they might get faster or longer. So what does all this mean for you injury wise?

Well the first thing to consider here is what is an injury? Do we need to see structural damage to body tissue e.g. a fracture or a muscle tear for an injury to be diagnosed? What if we have pain, and (as often happens now very early) you get an MRI or an X-Ray and no “damage” shows up. Does your pain matter?

Let’s think about the types of structure that might get injured/become painful and try to put some principles in place around this. At a very basic level if we divide the types of pain you might get as a result of progressive training into:

• Muscle generated pain/injury
• Tendon generated pain/injury
• Bone generated pain/injury

Assuming no underlying issues with any of these structures then generally what I would expect to see with a progressive increase in training as we see in this marathon block is that muscle generated pain is the first type of pain that will present. It takes slightly longer for tendon pain to surface, and longer again for bone pain. Generally speaking-and by no means a hard or fast rule.

If we now think about the reasons for developing injury we can broadly classify 2 categories:

• We overload a tissue-too much/too fast/too soon-this can cause a problem very quickly-as we discussed in our last blog
• We apply stress to a tissue abnormally i.e. how we move (our biomechanics) cause a structure to become painful-this usually takes longer to cause problems

All 3 of our types of pain/injury can be caused by our 2 mechanisms above. In this blog let’s consider what usually occurs around this stage of training, and in upcoming blogs we can discuss the features of injuries relevant to that stage!

What I usually see at this stage is muscle generated pain or injury because of an overload. Often people come into me having strained a calf, or with very “tight/heavy” quads. There may even have been an “incident” during a run.

So what should you do?

• Do not run if you have pain
• Get an early assessment with a medical professional you know has some degree of interest in running
• You may have some pain related to a sudden increase in training – known as DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness)-and if you are assessed early enough you may discover that you can keep training, albeit adjusted
• Assuming your pain is not DOMS then keep doing some training e.g. cross training/cycling/swimming if they do not cause pain. This will make returning to training easier for you once your pain is gone

Usually adequate rest from aggravating activity, adjustment of your training plan, and potentially the addition of some exercises will allow for a quick return to your training plan with muscular pain/injury, and if you have attended someone who understands that you are preparing for a marathon, then some provision for the fact that you will continue to increase your training can be made by an exercise plan, or potentially some adjustments to your training plan.

In our next blog we’ll move onto tendon generated pain/injury and try to advise on how best to manage a very common cause of pain injury when preparing for a marathon.

Mark Kenneally is a member of the Irish Life Dublin Marathon Runners’ Support Squad, helping you to harness the power of support to achieve your goals. Olympians Catherina McKiernan and Mick Clohisey who have developed training plans for all races in the series and the marathon using their vast expertise and knowledge. They are joined by nutritionist, Olivia Keenan, and Sports Performance Psychologist Jessie Barr. To find out more follow the Irish Life Dublin Marathon social media channels.