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Until recently I didn’t even know how to pronounce the word quinoa, let alone how to cook it, and what it would taste like. I’ve read in a few places recently though just how good it is for runners, so thought I would give it a go.
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This exercise is in the achilles tendon section of this site for a good reason!
This is a nice early morning and ‘just before bed’ stretch that can be performed to help relieve tight, painful achilles tendons.
My first sports massage session yesterday seems to have already had a positive effect on my tight achilles tendons.
Ouch! I’ve just got back from having a sports massage to try and help me get rid of this lingering achilles tendon and calf pain.
Unsurprisingly it hurt quite a bit at times, but the therapist seemed to be very good indeed…
Training began in earnest today, as I let behind the boring monotonous easy base building runs of the last couple of months.
The next few weeks are still going to be pretty easy going, especially as my legs get used to my new forefoot/midfoot landing.
Today’s run was really good. 10 minutes warm up followed by 6 30 second strides with 1 minute recoveries, and then another 10 minutes to cool down.
What was really noticeable was how much easy it was to land forefoot when running the strides.
My calves are really tight today - probably due to an overexertion at the gym yesterday. I’m booked to have a sports massage tomorrow. A slight treat for myself as I’m off of work this week!
Although I’ve been very happy with my foam roller and in particular the exercise I do with it for relieving my calf pain and achilles tendonitis, I’ve still been experiencing tight achilles tendons for the first 5 or so minutes each morning. This has probably been exacerbated by my continuing efforts to move to a forefoot/midfoot footstrike.
My legs felt like lead tonight, and I also felt like I couldn’t breath at all. But other than that it was a great run!
3.64 miles at an average 8:38 mile/min pace with an average heart rate of 147.
I didn’t try too hard to get a forefoot strike tonight as my achilles are quite tight, as were my calf muscles. It felt pretty midfoot though.
I’m going to have an exercise free day tomorrow to try and recover nicely for a slightly longer run on Sunday.
A slight issue with my Garmin tonight! I stopped it to do some stretches after a mile, and then forgot to restart it again until after another half mile. Oh well! So the above distance isn’t exactly right!
I’ve been doing some form drills at home the last couple of nights, mainly running on the spot to ingrain the feeling of forefoot/midfoot footstrike and landing below my centre of gravity. So tonight I stopped running a couple of times, and then ran on the spot for a couple of seconds before starting to run again. This really hammered home the right feeling to me. It felt good running too. My right calf was a bit tight, so I’ve iced it tonight, and the achilles are bit tight too, so I’m hoping I’ll be OK in the morning.
I also managed to run most of the run at a cadence of 176 a minute - which may explain the faster average pace.