14 Mile Run After 5 Weeks Off

• Today I went for my first run for in exactly 5 weeks. If you’ve been following me on Twitter over the past months you would have noticed that my running has been rapidly improving and I was doing quite a bit of mileage. This all started in November last year when I made the crazy decision to run a 78 Mile UltraMarathon in September of this year. However about 6 weeks ago the race was cancelled because they couldn’t get the interest from competitors for the race, and despite being quite disappointed at the time it was quite a relief because I had a little bit of knee pain from increasing my mileage so quickly and having a few biomechanical faults that are promoting too much wear and tear. This all made me a little reluctant to sign up for another race straight away, although I am now craving running again!

  The 5 weeks I took off were very helpful and I have spent a fair bit of time working on correcting my pronation-pattern in my lower extremities which is putting too much strain on the knee. 5 Weeks without running was quite tough mentally but luckily the knee didn’t give me any pain, so I decided to go out today and put my corrective exercise training to the test, amongst other things… with another race in mind for September.

  I took a nice route down to the River Chelmer and ran 7 miles up and then straight back the same way. Usually my knee would have started giving me troubles after about two miles, but I went past this and it didn’t begin to hurt until about 10 miles, and even then it was only dull. I am attributing this to simply feeling tired after so much time off and my technique getting a little sloppy. All in all I felt pretty good the whole time and have been given a good sign that my corrective training is doing what I want it to – I just need to do more of it! (And obviously keep repeating my mantra of “I have healthy and functional biomechanics.” – My knee pain always decreased when I started saying it!)

  I was also trying out my new Inov-8 Waist Pack to carry all my bits and prepare me for actually running a race. I really liked using this as I didn’t get in the way at all and I will be practising with it all the time now. Since this was the first time I have run with a bag of any type for my long runs I also took some snacks and water along with me – both of which I have previously made do without through feeling it was too inconvenient to carry everything. This pack now changes everything.

  This morning I experimented with making my own energy bars so that they were all natural and the ingredients were all on my “Allowed” list and I wasn’t putting any extra stress on my body. The recipe was great, they tasted great, they were easily digestible, big enough to make an impact, small enough not to hinder my running – JUST GREAT!

  Stay tuned and I’ll be posting a blog about my energy bars in due course.

  So now I am back into my running I will take it slowly, decide on the race I am definitely going to do, and let you all know very soon.

  Below you will find today’s run details:

  
  
  July 9th, 2010 | Brett Sanders | 1 Comment | Tags: brett sanders, knee pain, runners knee, trail running, ultra marathons

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