Running High Mileage Comfortably
By: Dylan Zhao
Tags: Nutrition, Health, Running, Fitness, Lifestyle

Building your aerobic base is crucial for you to run your best in your distance races. However, building your aerobic base and increasing your mileage could cause issues and pains, causing unfortunate setbacks.

Keeping these things in mind while running high-mileage can help your quality of running.

Nutrition

Nutrition is critical for a runner to stay healthy as well as increase their overall fitness. Without a sufficient diet, you are very susceptible to injury and lack of energy. A recommended diet for a runner includes a balanced meal of protein, carbohydrates, and fats to ensure proper energy and performance.

Another big key to staying on top of your running is to stay hydrated. Staying hydrated allows your body to cool properly and excrete any unwanted waste your body produces. Vitamins are also crucial as it helps your body prevent injuries and provide the body to process roles within the body.

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11417160/

Foods such as avocado, cocoa, mushrooms, peppers, and many more are anti-inflammatory foods. This means that these foods are loaded with vitamins that help reduce inflammation, the leading cause of pain.

Photo by Anna Pelzer on Unsplash

Cold Showers

Cold showers are proven to be anti-inflammatory as it increases hormone levels called norepinephrine. Cold showers are also proven to help reduce delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). All of this contributes to enhanced recovery between runs, which helps you experience less pain and allow you to enjoy running more.

Strength & Conditioning

Strengthening your muscles is key to reducing injuries and running efficiently. Stated by a certified USATF running coach in Colorado,

“It (Strength training) prevents injuries by strengthening muscles and connective tissues; it helps you run faster by improving neuromuscular coordination and power, and it improves running economy by encouraging coordination and stride efficiency.”

Furthermore, in a study involving 16 well-training athletes, it was concluded that the people who strength trained for six weeks, had significantly improved their 5-kilometer time trial by over 3%.

Strength and conditioning help your flexibility, balance, mobility, and strength. This overall helps your running economy and promotes stride efficiency. Because of this, your muscles are able to expend less energy while running, therefore improving on your overall VO2 Max.

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

Sleep

Sufficient sleep is key to helping your body recover from the impact force of running high mileage. Insufficient sleep on a daily basis causes your body to increase TNFα levels, which is an inflammatory cytokine produced by macrophages, which causes swelling and inflammation, therefore pain.

Sleeping is also the time where your body is rebuilding and repairing any worked muscles during the day. This means that if you were to lack sleep, your body would not be fully restored to function the next day fully.

Photo by Kate Stone Matheson on Unsplash

Knowing when to back-off

Listening to your body is key to being able to run well. Overtraining could lead to injuries and burnout, which is an issue when running high mileage. To avoid this, you must learn to take it easy on days your body needs recovery.

Instead of taking a day entirely off, you can cross-train, such as hopping on a bike or going for a swim. Building up to high mileage running is crucial to injury-free running. A general rule of thumb is never to increase your mileage by 10%. For example, if you are running 50 miles one week, you should not run any more than 55 miles the next week.