Running makes a better Doctor

Most runners graduate from 5 and 10k to marathon distances. Although, I have run a few 10k runs in the past, but never has it been a race for which I trained as I did for the TCS World 10k event this year at Bangalore. This being an international standard Gold label event, it was the one which needed some effort to be put in before the race day. Now that it was to be completed as part of the Procam Slam, I decided to run this race after some serious preparation. This would be my first event after TMM in January. A 10-week plan was crafted by Ash with a challenging 41min target, my PB for this distance being 43:22  in Pune 10k challenge 2017. After an initial period of base building and strengthening, a 4week schedule with speed drills and fast tempo runs were incorporated into the plan. Gradually included but the challenging paces were too much to handle for the calves as I landed up with a muscle injury around 6weeks before the event. This meant a return to the physios table ...

Lessons from an injury One thing every avid runner dreads is an injury that lays him off running. While every runner has been injured at some time or the other in his career, what one learns from each injury and takes these lessons into the future decides how strong the setback makes you. With age, the muscles and other tissues get stiffer and more resistant to easy recovery after an effort. And every workout leaves us with micro injuries to muscles and soft tissues. These need adequate rest and nutrition to heal properly before the next intensive effort can be safely made. If healed incompletely, these injuries tend to accumulate over time and end up as severe ones, often forcing the runner to stop. These muscles go into small knots, which become tender points. Due to these, the muscles shorten and make them prone to pain and further injury when used during  the workouts. Improper warming up, inadequate hydration and cool down further increases the risk of having these painfu...