End of week 10

This was a recovery week. My calf muscles needed time to repair.

I had an appointment with a physiotherapist, I wanted some professional advice about fixing my calf muscle problem. I need to know what is going on and what I can do to fix things so I can continue running.

The lesson of the past two weeks is that yes my body had enough cardio conditioning to run but my leg muscles and tendons used when running distances needed more conditioning, they needed to be stretched and strengthened. So the coming weeks will mainly be used for exercising the right muscles.

The physio gave me a set of leg exercises designed to stretch and strengthen my calf muscles. Another two exercises treat the achilles tendon as well as the calf muscles.

I will add to these exercises another called the 'Walt Reynold's Special Achilles Strengthener' plus two more designed to stretch and strengthen the hamstring muscles.

These exercises are designed to give the muscles better endurance so I can run and they will still get a good blood supply and not tighten up or get damaged. All of these exercises can be done at home but I will once again take advantage of some specialised equipment and facilities they have at the gym.

I can see now that doing the right conditioning exercises is very important and it is something that I as a beginner had overlooked. I had committed two common faults, first trying to run too fast in training and second not using exercises to conditioning my body to distance running. As I run I learn and I found a lot of good information in these web pages:
http://www.over40runner.com/training/RunningForm/LongDistanceRunningForm.html
http://www.runningplanet.com/training/running-form.html

All training sessions whether gym, rpm, running or weights starts with stretching and strengthening exercises, either at the gym or at home before a road run. All of them end with a stretching and cool down exercises.

By the way this post was a bit late but still refers to week ten.