A few weeks ago our office had several patients who were training for the NY Marathon. Part of the training regimen which takes place over many months involves slowly increasing your mileage until you can tolerate a few longer runs before the race. Part of the group I worked with had problems but continued to attempt to run through them. A common assumption is that with running comes pain. What type of pain is normal from the longer runs and what type of pain is telling you that you are developing an injury? Part of the problem for runners is upper back strength to maintain posture during longer runs. The other part may be attributed to inherited body mechanics and how we adapted to them and finally, part of the problem may be a continuous impact from poor running habits. Longer distance runners injure themselves from repetitive impact that is unique to them. Since we are all different, we cannot make assumptions that all runners are injured because... . On the other hand, repetitive impact increases due to body asymmetry, the wrong shoes, worn shoes, asymmetrical gait, and many other reasons. You may reduce the likelihood of a running injury by cross-training with hard and easy days and mixing it up. Lower body and upper body muscular strengthening can help as well as foam rolling before your run. Runners World offered some tips to prevent injury while increasing your mileage. Check out the article below Your Road Map to Increasing Mileage and Staying Injury-Free Use these expert tips to help reduce your risk of injury while you go the distance. BY ELIZABETH MILLARD PUBLISHED: APR 11, 2023 Going for longer runs is a common part of running, especially if you have a particular goal, like a race. And those extra miles can feel thrilling. However, unless you have a structured time frame and use the right products for strengthening specific muscles, that increase in weekly distance can come with an increased risk of overtraining and subsequent injury. Since substantial force is absorbed by the body whenever one foot hits the ground, and this happens repeatedly—sometimes thousands of times during an outing—running is considered a physically high-stress sport, according to Alina Kennedy, CSCS, a certified running coach and physiotherapist in New York City. With more mileage comes more force. “Whenever a runner increases mileage, their body has to get used to this new volume of stress,” she told Runner’s World. “The joints, tendons, ligaments, and muscles have to adapt and build up enough stress resilience—otherwise they’ll break down and get injured.” Read more