FASTER RECOVERY AFTER MARATHON

What does it mean to finish a marathon? The finish line looks like a battlefield with runners wobbling and hobbling around with pain allover their bodies and mind. For most runners it also means continuous suffering from muscle soreness, ligament and tendon pain for days and even weeks, when walking up and down the stairs is a real torture.

Are we really supposed to pay like this for the pleasure of running a marathon? Is there any way to avoid this or at least reduce these unpleasant consequences?

What does muscle, ligament, and tendon soreness mean? It means that all these tissues are over-stretched, over-pulled, and overloaded by your own body weight while you run the marathon. Your body cannot handle the length of repetitive work, especially with technique deterioration.

As a result your muscles are losing their normal ability to contract and relax, which are their main functions. The soreness is just a manifestation of destruction of connection and coordination between tissues. To bring your tissues to their normal condition and to reduce the pain we need to recover their ability to contract and relax.

Certainly running with the Pose Method gives you a possibility to avoid these negative consequences. But what if you are not familiar with the Pose Method or didn’t learn it well enough to run with this technique through the whole marathon? How you can make your recovery faster and more effective? For this matter you need to learn a very simple procedure which I call strength recovery.

The essence of the strength recovery is very simple – you have to do local strength exercises for specific muscle groups. You do it in concentric regime with resistance allowing for some 20 to 30 repetitions in one set in order to get your muscles to the feeling of burning.

You can start doing these exercises at the same day, immediately after the marathon, in a hotel gym or just in a hotel room using rubber bands.

Begin from the most loaded muscles, such as quadriceps, and do the knee extension exercises. Then follow to the knee flexion exercises for the hamstrings (Strength Conditioning: Hamstring and Hips Exercises, p.12). Then do some sideway foot movement, in and out, with the knee bent at 90 degrees. For the hip area you can use exercises from pp.25-26, and 35-36.

The next area to recover is your low back and low abdominal. You can do the exercises lying on the floor and moving legs up and down. For your feet you can do exercises with the emphasis on a dorso-flexion movement and on the foot rotation with rubber band resistance.

All of these exercises should be done in 2-3 sets with 20 to 30 reps in one set. In the week following the marathon these exercises should be done almost every day, and then every other day, depending on the speed of your recovery and soreness going down.

Together with strength exercises you should do some stretching exercises and some running with a moderate speed, reps of 200m, easy jogging on the grass or trails. During 1-2 weeks of this training your body condition will be close to normal.

In the Pose Method® this kind of recovery usually takes just 2-3 days, or the longest up to a week, because of much less damage to all connective tissues, which almost disappears in a couple of days. Nevertheless our runners routinely use strength recovery procedure to accelerate even this short time of recovery.

Additionally we recommend to take a hot bath with apple cider vinegar, which also gives a very positive effect. This is an ancient recipe proved by practical use of many generations.

Dr.Romanov