Healing Miles...

For a long time, I thought that there was a more-or-less linear relationship between the number of miles you ran and the number of injuries you got. I figured mileage was a necessary evil, a potent booster for aerobic fitness, but also a dangerous burden to lay upon the fragile bones and tendons of the runner's body.

I accepted the fact that the body was a mechanism -- like a car or a set of bicycle tires -- and it would wear out like them. The more miles, the more wear and tear. It followed, that the very worst thing you could do was to run "junk mile" -- slow runs that added to the wear but didn't promote better fitness.

I think it was John Glenn who famously remarked that he figured that the Good lord had given him a certain number of heartbeats and he wasn't going to waste them running.

I think it was my friend Kevin Bruno who first put a crack in this idea. He told me that when he was really fit -- by which he meant when he was running 100 miles a week -- he recovered very quickly from all manner of ailments. At first, I was skeptical (If you knew Kevin, you would have been skeptical, too). I figured that anyone running 100 miles a week should not be trusted. But he persisted, and told me that he felt that at the very least, I should be doing long runs (15-20 miles) once a week, and that if I did, I would find myself recovering faster from workouts, races, etc.

While I think there are important cautions to this approach, I think that Kevin is basically right -- or to be even more careful -- I think that in my experience, I have found a healing benefit to doing longer runs. It seems to me that when I include one run of 90 minutes or longer once a week, with friends at a conversational pace on trails or through the woods, I do in fact seem to recover much more quickly. I guess I could go out on a limb and say that in general, as I run higher mileage, I seem to be able to handle more (workouts, etc.) and am able to come back from a hard effort in just a few days.

Now, there ARE certainly injury risks to running more. Some parts of the body do wear out, and the entire body needs rest and recovery to benefit from any kind of training. But at the same time, I have found that recovery can be active -- recovery from a track workout or race can involve slow, easy jogging or even running at a normal training pace. Some running (or at least walking) is often better than total rest, even for such demanding efforts as marathons.

One possible explanation for the healing benefit of long runs, or mileage in general, is the phenomenon of capillarization: the growth of more capillaries to serve the skeletal muscles. Run every day for a few years and your body will respond by producing more capillaries. More capillaries not only deliver more oxygen to working muscles, they carry away more metabolic wastes. A trained distance runner has a cardiovascular system that is better at recovery, repair, and rejuvenation of muscles.

I think ultimately, the most important thing about recovery running is to know yourself well enough to know how to take it easy when running. For me, it involves throwing away the watch and running someplace that I really like. that's as important in my recovery as the number of miles run. It's always a surprise to me how much of sound training practice involves doing what feels good.

And as for John Glenn, what he failed to appreciate is that if he ran every day -- if he "wasted" an hour's worth of heartbeats every day -- he would find that his resting heart rate during the other 23 hours would be lower enough to more than offset the heartbeats he spent in exercise. Sometimes the easiest path is the longest one.