How to manage wear in long-distance running?

Question

The skin can get broken. The skin can get too dry and then broken. Blisters may develop with certain shoes. Pain in tibial tendon may be more regular with fore-foot training. Pain in knees may be more regular with with middle-foot training or back-foot training. If you have too much weight, it may be better to train more in swimming pool rather than on tracks to avoid injuries in bones and muscles.

What are ways you manage wear as a long-distance runner? How have you planned your life-style and training to avoid injuries?

Answer 1

Follow your feelings and do what you love! Why do runners love running?

Runner can experience wears such as blisters, feel odd pains or feel pains too late. If you have too much adrenaline in your blood, you may feel abrupt pain at the very end and not during running -- this makes it extremely important to design training schedule or you may break your tendons or something else. Interval training is extremely important part of safe training.

It is important to understand some basic physiology of your body. Dizziness may simply be because of dehydration. Fever may simply be because of running out of energy. Too much wear and too long recover time may be because of poorly-designed training schedules or misusing equipments such as shoes. Chronic diseases such as diabetes I can mean much more delicate training schedules and continuous monitoring of things such as energy intake, energy burnt and blood-sugar-level. Wear can be due to multiple reasons. It can be because of a cut. It may be because you do not understand basic skin maintenance and or basic hygiene. It may be because your diet misses some important item or you have wrong diet with certain training. Nevertheless it is extremely important to learn basic wear maintenance to avoid infections and that way also illnesses. Running can be an extremely good for the type II diabetists to work with the insulin-resistance. It will be good for your stamina or at least it can be a form of perfection to learn new things about life and how it works.

I list below items for the wear management. It misses rehabilitation and how things can differ when things go very bad. For the start, you should match your fitness profile to distance like with the distance-profiler here but as injured/worn-out you may need to rehabilitate through other forms of sport first such as swimming and cycling. Safe training requires work!

Nutrients

The nutrients below can be essential to your training. Health has many parts such as muscle health, joint health, bone health and performance. I recommend natural sources for Glucosamine like seashell. Measure your ground mineral levels periodically: iron deficiency can make you powerless particularly in hot sweaty weather.

• BCAA: after long distance running like 60-90 minutes, catabolism will start to break down fats and muscle in order to release energy. This can be experienced as different kinds of pains such as knee pain. Before the training, BCAA supplement can protect against the muscle loss. BCAA can also be got from a variety of food. BCAA is for muscle health.

• Glucosamine alleviates the pain in joints particularly when digested naturally from bone marrow, animal bones, the shells of shellfish and fungi with enough fat. This is something that will make repetitive training less painful to bones and joints. In comparison, BCAA is for muscle pain and not for joint/bone pain like Glucosamine. Glucosamine is for joint/bone health.

• Iron is a common supplement in endurance runners by the Journal article here. It plays a key role in many metabolism reactions: too low serum ferritin levels can result to fatigue and lack of interest in training. Measure the iron levels before supplemenations because of too much iron is toxic and ground minerals such as iron and zinc are tradeoffs.

• Glutamine fuels white blood cells that are important for immune system. Natural sources of glutamine contain sources rich in protein. Notice that "One of L-glutamine’s main roles in the body is to support detoxification by cleansing the body from high levels of ammonia. It acts as a buffer and converts excess ammonia into other amino acids, amino sugars and urea. (12) and it follows "Doing approximately one hour of exercise can cause a 40 percent reduction of glutamine in the body. It can also cause suppressed immune function. This has a negative impact on your resistance training and may lead to overtraining syndrome."

Shoes

• use many shoes: now the wear gets to different positions so more time for skin to heal

• powder in shoes to add an extra layer of movement: I use normal kitchen-cooking-powders particularly with shoes getting me blisters (my friend is recommending magnesium for this)

• not using the same shoes in a row: shoes require some time to recover, this makes them last longer and you can be more certain of using proper shoes

• enough washing of shoes: you don't want to get wear because of laziness!

Training

• scheduled daily interval-training: 10km, 3km,3km, 5km, 10km, 15km, pause, stretching, 3km, 5km, ...

• enough hydration particularly during sunny training -- I have noticed that sunny training requires easily many litres more drinking than non-sunny training!

• avoid too much sun -- particularly if your skin is not used to it

• if you have a blister during running, change the running-style: sometimes the pain goes away when you interval-run between fore-foot-running, middle-foot-running and back-foot-running. Changing running style also results in more balanced wear over your whole body.

• improve technique like gazello running style, glider running style, middle-foot running style and high cadency running. Please notice that the gazello running style used by elite marathoners is very exhaustive to the whole body and it requires sufficient flexibility in posterior/anterior muscles in legs, knees and hips. Personally I am right-legged and noticed that it is easy to overtrain the other side causing the inflexibilities to the legs meaning that in high tempo the middle part of your body (potentially related to Diaphragm-Psoas Connection) does unnecessary twisting around the axis.

• adapt the running style to the environment: save your knees by using forefoot running on hard surfaces. Save your tibial tendon on softer surfaces, now middle/back-foot running will result into less stress to your knees.

Life-style

• proper diet: intensive tibial tendon training requires more protein-fat-loaded food, good against injuries and faster recovery. Bananas after normal training good. Listen to your body: any pain in muscles or bones may reflect wrong diet, many times a good balanced diet with enough fat makes knee-pains and tibial pain going away.

• body lotion and repeated lotioning to dry skin after intensive training

• enough sleep: you will get wear and blisters sooner-or-later, remember to sleep enough!

Pharmacy

• B12 lotion or B12 powder against soar wears particularly with thighs

• middle-fat lotion against cuts/dry-skin for soles such as here