This is Getting Ridiculous - Injuries!

I decided that after London Marathon I would need a chance to rest and recuperate and booked a treatment session on the Thursday after hoping that my legs would be on the mend and it would be a less painful experience.  No such luck, but I managed not to cry on the table!  I did learn a lot more about the state of my legs, which is not that good:

• Right hip flexor strain is restricting right leg movement and giving pain in lower abs area also.
• Both calves gastrocnemius is tight, but especially on right leg which is pulling on the Achilles.
• Left hamstring is very tight restricting forward movement of that leg.
• Left patella tendonitis, not causing pain while running but discomfort at the front of the knee while sitting or standing for long periods.
• Both knees ITB tightness leading to minor pain on the outside of the knee while sitting .

I think it's important to find the original injury and work out what caused that.  In my case , I remember the hip flexor pain being around for the longest and it was probably an overuse injury of originally weak and inflexible hips.   As I have done more marathons the hip flexor issue has been getting slowly better (I have been doing some stretching of this) but it's obviously time to get a bit more serious about this.

All this is making me really unbalanced when running and the odd biomechanics could well lead to serious and long term injury.  I need to do something about this and the first thing is to cut back on the running miles, do some cross-training (cycling/swimming) and really focus on getting over these niggles.  So the plan is to get a rehab programme together to target the injuries, improve flexibility and strength and get some balance back.

I have a bit of down-time between marathons (3 weeks between London and Richmond Park) so I have time to give blood, which I manage to do three times a year and still fit in several marathons and halfs.  It also gives me an excuse to not do any fast runs for a week or so, so I can concentrate on getting fit.