For many seasons I always seemed to get injured a couple of weeks after the start of Spring, during the exact time when I wanted to be out on the trails enjoying the warm sunshine. Often the injuries would be relatively minor while on some occasions I’d be sidelined for up to 10 weeks. It wasn’t until I realized that I had been making the biggest springtime running mistake that I was able to reverse my trend of early-season injuries.
The biggest springtime running mistake is being over-ambitions with your early season fitness and ability. You can avoid this by increasing strength training in the latter part of winter and beginning spring training at a much lighter intensity than you would run later in the season.
Let’s take a closer look at exactly how the springtime running mistake occurs and, more importantly, what you can do to keep yourself injury-free.
How To Avoid The Biggest Springtime Running Mistake
Before we get into how to avoid the biggest springtime running mistake, we should first identify what that biggest running mistake actually is. This is a mistake that I have made countless times myself and has set the start of my season back by months. What I am referring to is getting over-ambitious with the runs that I do at the beginning of Spring. I have a tendency to do this simply because I get super excited about having the warm spring weather replacing the cold and miserable winter conditions. We want to make the most of the opportunity to get out into the mountains and enjoy the trails with our friends.
It’s a mistake that I’ve done many times before. I wake up on a beautiful weather morning during early spring and get a call from a running friend, that I know is stronger than I am, asking me to join them on a relaxing run along a mountain trail. Because I want to make the most of the good weather, I agree to join them.
However, the mistake here is that I end up running further than my early-season fitness can support. For instance, where I would normally head out on an 8-mile long run at the beginning of my spring season by joining my stronger friends there have been times where I’ve ended up doing around 20 miles. The trouble is that by enjoying the sunshine, the birds chirping, and the greenery of the mountains during spring I over-extend myself. This leaves my body feeling broken for a few days and heavily fatigued for even longer.
The trouble is that I can’t seem to bring myself to just sit around during the week and recover while the spring weather is so great. This becomes the crux of the issue. Being so excited about enjoying the Spring weather I make my midweek runs further than what is on my training program and thereby overfatigue my body to the point where I get my seemingly annual Springtime running injury.
Letting The Good Weather Make Us Over-Ambitious
I’ll be the first to admit that I am not the greatest fan of cold and wet winter weather. I far prefer running along mountain trails in the warm sunshine of springtime. And this has exactly been my downfall many times over the course of my running career.
What happens when I head out for a run on that first really good weather day of spring is that I let all of that warm sunshine make me too over-ambitious for what my body is physically capable of doing so early in the season.
After feeling like I have been stuck inside for months during winter I don’t want to waste any of the precious sunshine by taking a rest day. So I end up heading out for another long trail run when my body isn’t yet recovered from the previous one. More than once I have ruined the first half of my running season by getting injured just by being over-ambitious in that first warm week of springtime. Most often it is an Achilles/calf strain but one year I got shin splints that set me back 3 months.
Top Tips For Avoiding Springtime Injuries
Through a process of trial and error and battling with Springtime injuries I’ve come up with a couple of top tips that will help you to avoid the kind of setbacks that I caused myself over the course of the years. If I had known about these tips back when I started out I would have probably saved many of my seasons by staying injury free during the crucial opening weeks of the spring season.
Be Consistent With Strength Training
My first tip is to be very consistent with strength training, especially during the winter months, and ramp up strength training towards the end of the winter. If you have managed to be consistent with your strength training during winter and begin your spring season coming out of a solid block of strength training your muscles will be strong and conditioned enough to cope with those early spring run workouts. You will be less likely to have problems if you happen to end up being a bit ambitious and running a little too far on your first day back outside.
Make Easy Runs Truly Easy
One thing that you need to be aware of as you launch into the beginning of a new spring season is that you should make your easy runs very easy. By this, I mean that easy runs should be at an easier level than what they would normally be throughout the rest of your running season.
What I tend to do is besides making my long runs at that very easy level, I also make my shorter runs during the course of the week very slow and easy too. Any run that doesn’t have a specific workout structure such as intervals or hills will be treated as a recovery run and be done at an equally slow and easy pace. That way my legs can have maximum recovery between each of the key workouts that I have on my training plan.
Get Outside Help
The next key to being able to get in through the beginning of a spring season without risking injury is by enlisting some sort of outside help.
This could be in the form of having a coach or could even be in the form of downloading an early season training program and sticking to that program so that you are able to ease into your new season without any undue risk of injury.
Something else that I also do at the beginning of a new spring season is to diligently measure my resting heart rate each morning as well as check my body weight. My objective here is not to see if I am losing weight right at the beginning of the season as I start to get myself back into shape.
What I want to do is check to see if there are any sudden fluctuations in my body weight or resting heart rate. Either of these two, but especially the latter could be an indication that I’ve been pushing some of my early season time runs a little too hard and I need to back up a little bit. For me a sudden increase in my morning resting heart rate of 15 beats per minute is often an indication that I am either over-fatigued or in the process of coming down with a minor cold.
What I then do is ease up on the volume and intensity of my training for a few days and once my heart rate is back down to its normal level when I get up in the morning I know that I’m healthy enough to resume the ramping up of my spring running volume.
Make Progression The Key To A Spring Season
The key focus of any spring season is to make progression the goal rather than trying to hit any specific fitness targets.
The way that I’ve started to do this is to apply my pacing strategy for the races that I run for my entire season. Allow me to explain. My pacing strategy for most of my runs is to try and negative-split the run whereby I run the second off of my race slightly faster than the first half.
I use the same plan when structuring my running season whereby I want the second half of my running season to be at a higher level of fitness than the first half. In order to be able to make this work I need to be consistent and make progression my goal for the first half of the season so that I can stay injury free and have the base necessary to be able to negative-split my overall season.