Most runners live in fear as race day approaches. The long months of distance have been logged. The painful ladder of easier to more intense intervals has been climbed. Hills have been crested, tempo runs endured, form sessions meticulously performed, and tune-up competitions completed.
All that’s left is for something to go wrong.
“I woke up one morning,” says Rod Dixon, the 1972 Olympic 1500-meter bronze medalist and 1983 New York Marathon champion, “and I said, ‘Whoa, where did that eight hours go? I feel as bad getting out of bed as I did getting into it!’”
It’s a runner’s nightmare. With race day in the headlights, we get zapped by injury, illness or the symptoms of overtraining: heavy legs, flat energy level, can’t sleep, won’t eat, don’t feel like running at all.
One thing is for certain: The training that got us into this mess won’t get us out of it.
RELATED: 10 Essential Strength Exercises for Runners
Luckily, strategies exist to combat many causes of prerace breakdown. It’s just that some of these strategies are a little out of the ordinary. But for runners willing to take a leap of faith, these counterintuitive approaches can make the difference between a wasted training cycle and a great race.
DIAGNOSIS: HEAVY-LEGGED SYNDROME
PRESCRIPTION: LONG, EASY DISTANCE
Twenty years ago, I received a panicked call from Kevin, a high school athlete whom I’d coached to an 800-meter league championship the previous year. Now a senior, Kevin had been coached by another coach since I’d moved out of state six months earlier.
“My legs are totally dead,” said Kevin. “My 800 time has gone from 1:59 to 2:11. And Coach has given up on me. He says I’m on my own. League finals are six weeks away, and I don’t know what to do!”
After calming Kevin down, I advised him to stop running entirely for 10 days. Complete rest was the only cure I knew for dead legs. “Then,” I said, “we start over.”
Though Kevin rebounded to run 2:01, good for second place in league, the down time robbed him of months of precious base work. I kicked myself at the time, certain there was a better cure for dead legs. I just didn’t know what it was.
Turns out I was right. More than two decades earlier, Arthur Lydiard, the legendary New Zealand coach, had devised the perfect remedy for heavy-legged syndrome: Go long.
“While I was training, always in the Lydiard way,” says Lorraine Moller, four-time Olympic marathoner and bronze medalist at the 1992 Barcelona Games, “if there was a training issue the remedy was always easy aerobic running until you ‘came right.’ Problems nearly always stemmed from overtraining, [and] the remedy was to oxygenate the body with long-ish runs.”
Lydiard’s answer to dead legs was more running, not less—certainly not time off. It was just that the running had to be slow and aerobic.
“The long aerobic run is your home,” says Dixon, one of a long line of New Zealand distance stars to embrace Lydiard’s training methods. “Home is where you find comfort. It’s where you go to sleep, to rest. Your long aerobic run is your home base. It’s where you go to feel comfortable.”
When Dixon awakened to discover himself as fatigued as when he’d gone to sleep, he didn’t panic. Instead, he went for a run.
“A long, slow aerobic run would always correct me,” says Dixon. “And this was in the middle of my European track season. I’d go out for a 2-hour, maybe 2-hour, 20-minute run. Later, when I would go through the same symptoms, I’d do the same thing.”
If one long run doesn’t fix your dead legs, then try two. If not two, then three. Eventually, your legs will feel refreshed, and you won’t have sacrificed months of training.
DIAGNOSIS: QUADRICEPS PAIN
PRESCRIPTION: BRISK DOWNHILL RUNNING
In June 2007, I developed severe quadriceps pain. In the space of three weeks, my 5K time slowed by 2 minutes. My long run dropped from 15 miles to 5. I couldn’t run intervals. Couldn’t run on cement. Couldn’t walk up or down stairs at all.
I tried changing running shoes. I iced my quads after every workout. I stretched more. When that didn’t work, I stretched less. I gobbled Advil. Chased it with aspirin. Choked down handfuls of vitamins A, C and E. And finally quit running for a month.
RELATED: A Runner’s Guide to Over-the-Counter Pain Medication
When I returned to training, nothing had changed. My quads still ached.
Desperate, I resorted to a “cure” I’d read about on the internet. But it sounded so preposterous, so incredibly counterintuitive, that I held little hope for success.
This is what I did: I jogged 2 miles up a fire trail in the nearby San Gabriel Mountains, and then I turned around and raced back down the trail at tempo effort. Before I’d gone half a mile, there were tears in my eyes. At a mile, I was mewling like a lost kitten. At the bottom, I hobbled to my car, certain that I’d done irreparable damage.
Three days later, my quads were as good as new. No, that’s a lie. They were better than new.
“Running downhill can cure quad pain once a runner’s legs adapt to the eccentric overload caused by the activity,” says Tom Schwartz, coach and coauthor of Build Your Running Body. “Initially, the soreness caused by downhill running can be quite harsh. A parallel is the soreness caused by starting a new weight training regimen. Soreness is caused by the lowering of weights, which is the eccentric loading. Lifting weights, which is concentric loading, doesn’t cause soreness.”
With concentric loading, our muscle shortens. When we perform dumbbell curls, a concentric contraction of our biceps bends our elbow, bringing our hand toward our shoulder.
Eccentric loading occurs when muscles lengthen and shorten at the same time. When we run, our quadriceps contracts when our foot touches the ground. This stabilizes our knee and stops us from collapsing. But even stabilized, our knee bends slightly, stretching our quadriceps as it shortens. This eccentric tug-of-war creates enormous tension in our quads.
Brisk downhill running increases the eccentric load on our quads, causing more muscle damage. The good news is that once our body repairs this damage, we’re left with quads that are pain-free, stronger and protected from further injury for up to six weeks.
Schwartz recommends running 20-to 30-second repetitions down a 3 percent grade at about 1500 meter–3K race speed. He suggests four repetitions for the first session, six reps a week later, and an additional two reps each week until reaching a maximum of 12. It’s important to note that easy downhill running will not provide the same effect.
When I suffered a new bout of severe quadriceps pain again, I went back to my fire trail and ran the same 2 miles of hard downhill. Two weeks later, I took first place in the national masters 10K cross country championships.
DIAGNOSIS: CALF PAIN AND ACHILLES TENDINOSIS
PRESCRIPTION: HEEL DIPS
As race day nears, many runners insert sessions of shorter, intense intervals into their training. Not surprisingly, these same runners frequently experience a sudden onset of calf pain or Achilles tendinosis.
Once again, the treatment is eccentric loading.
“Typically, eccentric exercise produces quite a strong training stimulus,” says Jonathan Dugas, director of health and research at the Vitality Group and coauthor with Ross Tucker, Ph.D., of The Runner’s Body. “We know that during those contractions we activate less muscle, although moving the same amount of weight. This is thought to cause the muscle damage since fewer fibers are doing the same work and therefore fatigue more quickly.”
Dugas and Tucker recommend heel dips for treating Achilles tendinosis. This cure doubles as a strategy for strengthening our calves. With heel dips, we balance one foot on a sturdy platform or step, resting on the ball of our foot with our heel hanging over the back of the platform. Using our hands for support (e.g., fingertips against a wall), we lower our heel until we feel the stretch in our calf, and then we use both legs to return to our starting position. The authors suggest eight to 16 reps.
Related video: Exercises to help your lower legs.
Dugas and Tucker’s regimen is adapted from the “180 repetition” calf raise program of Swedish orthopedist Hakan Alfredson. Suffering from degenerative Achilles tendinosis, Alfredson attempted to rupture his Achilles tendons with high volume bouts of eccentric calf exercises. Instead, his condition improved.
Dugas proposes that heel dips—and other eccentric exercises—work by “stimulating neuromuscular changes as opposed to just muscular changes.”
DIAGNOSIS: COLDS, ALLERGIES, AND RACE-DAY SLUGGISHNESS
PRESCRIPTION: A REDUCED TAPER
“I always got colds about a week to 10 days before the marathon,” says Peter Gilmore, the top American finisher at the 2006 New York City and 2007 Boston marathons. “Then, at the Houston Half in 2006, I was sitting there with Brian Sell, who was like Mr. Consistency. He’d won the half marathon that day, just crushed everyone. And he didn’t taper at all for that race.”
Gilmore isn’t alone. Many runners discover that a traditional taper of 40–60 percent leaves them susceptible to colds, allergy attacks, and a feeling of staleness when race day arrives. Whether this occurs because of an immune system letdown in response to the taper, a loss of normal training rhythm or some other reason, the result can be a poor performance on race day.
For these runners, a reduced taper to 75–80 percent of normal volume can provide better results. Depending on whether we’re running a marathon, 5K or some other distance, the taper should begin anywhere from a couple weeks out to a couple days.
RELATED: Try This Tactical Approach to Tapering
“Before my next race at Boston,” says Gilmore, “I cut back a lot less than I’d normally cut back and PRd by 2 minutes, running 2:12:45. I never looked back. I did the same thing at New York and ran 2:13. Not only did I not get sick, but my girlfriend at the time—now my wife—was really sick. So I had every opportunity to get sick.
“The biggest thing is that you feel better,” Gilmore adds. “If you taper less, you’re more in your normal mode. You let your body rest without letting it know that it’s resting.”
LAST COUNTERINTUITIVE WORD
When I told Kevin to take 10 days off running all those years ago, I was operating under the misconception that the cure for dead legs—and most running setbacks—was rest. I was wrong. The cure sometimes involves increased running and specific eccentric exercises. When the result of a training strategy is a healthier body and faster race times, it can no longer be called counterintuitive; it’s common sense.
