Pulled my calf muscle on Saturday on my second park run, foolishly or not a quarter of a lap to go. I wasn't going to be a DNF, then in the afternoon we went shopping and a lot of walking.My question is when the pain stops or lessons, when do I restart again, at what speed compared to my normal pace and for how long? I seem to have dropped the 5 minute warm up walk, should I still be carrying on with this?
I should have run tonight, but know I still have a day or two of recovery minimum but do not want to go too long before I am back at it.
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Definitely take a couple of days off to let it heal. On Wednesday go out for a run and just do a nice easy pace and do a warm up and cool down. See how you are after that. If all is good then you should be fine. Good luck.
I simply wait for pain or big discomfort to stop. That could be anywhere - thighs, ankles, knees, lower back, anything. Then I’ll do a simple run, no interval speed (more of a jog) and listen to whatever signals I’m getting. If all good I’ll run until I stop feeling comfortable and then I’ll finish and go home while I’m still feeling good. That is normally my easy distance of around 5K. Then I take it from there and rebuild the form.
We all have different tempos and different distances that make us feel comfortable so the idea is to do whatever your body enjoys, irrespective of any targets. 1 kilometre? One kilometre is good. Any sign of trouble? Stop running.
What l do while I am not running though is other forms of exercise that keep my body engaged and my cardio running. Again, we are all different so for as long as you’re doing anything that doesn’t aggravate the current issue, you’ll be as good as new.
I don't have an answer, but am in a similar situation. It's three months since I completed C25K. I maintained the three 5ks a week, and am gradually building up towards 10k. I pulled a muscle or something at Saturday parkrun, and had to hobble home.
After a decent walk on Sunday I decided to go for a run on Monday evening. Unfortunately, I got the same pain and had to stop after about 1.5k. I tried to rest and stretch then continue, but it was too painful.
After a rest I tried jogging home, but had to walk instead. However, after a few minutes of walking I was able to do a light jog the rest of the way without significant discomfort. So that was encouraging.
I suspect lack of warm up was at least an aggravating factor both times. So I'm thinking I'll have a couple of days rest, then try an gradually builds up from a slow jog.
My warmup walk sometimes used to be a brisk walk from the car park to get to the start by 9!
I tend to suffer if I don't warm up. There's a link somewhere to the warmup stretches (dynamic stretches, lots of leg swinging) for runners on the Strength & flex sister site, and a set of cooldown stretches for afterwards (held stretches).
I've told this story before, but when I started c25k I always did all the stretches and warmups because I knew my body wasn't used to the effort. My sporty husband suddenly took a liking to running, thought he was too fit to bother with stretching, and got a painful bout of shin splints.
I'd say, if you dropped the warmup and pulled a muscle, you need to do the warmup.
Sorry about the injury. It’s rubbish to be on the couch when you’re in a roll. Hopefully it’ll be a small blip-honestly, we all get them and we get stronger and move on, Lots of great advice above. Take it slow, forget about pace and play it by ear. Try and leave expectations about how far and how fast to run to one side until you’re back in the swing of things again. There’s no magic formula. The main thing is not to push through pain and seek help if it isn’t settling. Patience is hard to find but from bitter experience, trying to come back too soon and too aggressively leads to more time out in the long run.
When I’ve had injury issues, the physio has always prescribed strength exercises to help minimise the chance of getting hurt again. If you’re not already doing strength and flex work, that’s really worth picking up now. The added bonus is it’ll also make you faster. I knocked about five minutes off my 5k pb coming back after injury and that was all down to strength! There’s a nice article about getting started here…
Regarding dropping the warm up walk, what have you replaced it with? It isn’t the only way to warm up but it is important to do something. I sometimes warm up inside and then start running from the door if the weather is particularly rubbish.
I am blessed that, to date, I've not experienced a running injury (apart from bramble or rhododendron brashings or rubbed feet!) I never, ever stretch before a run. I don't necessarily time my warm up walk so it probably isn't always a full 5 minutes and I have learned that it probably isn't good for me to make it very brisk, but I do always do it.
I have however occasionally felt a calf twinge and it has correlated strongly with less than full length legwear so that might be something to consider for your return to running.
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