Everyone plans the race.
Almost nobody plans
the fortnight after
It starts with a few days of going downstairs sideways. The soreness is actually the first thing to go.
It starts with a few days of going downstairs sideways. The soreness is actually the first thing to go.
What you need changes every few weeks of a training block. Pick where you are, before or after race day, and see what applies.
Your mileage is lower than it will be and nothing hurts yet. You have more room to deal with things now than at any other point, which is what makes this the easy end. Calves, Achilles and hip flexors take the mileage.
Peak weeks, and the most fatigue you will carry all block. What ends a training block is usually a tightness that was fine until the week it wasn't. Calves, Achilles and hip flexors take the mileage.
This is the window, and it's the question Jonathan gets asked most. 48 hours is the minimum: anything deep enough to be worth doing needs a day or two to settle. The session is aimed at race day, not your mileage.
Not nothing, but not a full session. Anything deep this close to the race has no time to settle before you run on it. Light work only.
Soreness peaks between one and three days after, and this is when your body does the recovering on its own. Most of what hurts now won't be helped by massage. If something feels out of proportion to the race (pain far worse than normal soreness, a leg that is swelling, or urine that has gone dark), see a GP, not a massage therapist. The whole back of the legs, and you'll know about it.
By now most people are moving again, and the research says gentle running helps you get your spring back better than resting. The race tends to leave the same things tight: a calf that hasn't let go, a hip flexor that's been tight since mile twenty. Calves, Achilles and hip flexors. Still the same three.
Your mileage is coming back, and speed work is usually still two weeks away. Now the question changes again, from what the race did to you to what your next block will need. Blood tests go back to normal within a week or two, but the muscle itself takes a lot longer, which is why you feel more recovered than you are. Whatever coming back to running has brought up.
I've been seeing Jonathan for a couple of weeks in the build up to a massive event. He is definitely an expert in his field and has worked out some of the restrictions due to muscle tightness and has definitely got me race ready.
No. Twelve weeks out, your mileage is climbing and nothing hurts. Six weeks out, your long runs are the longest they'll be. In race week, the question is no longer what you can handle but what you can't afford to upset. Treating those as the same appointment on different dates is how training blocks end early. If you want the whole body gone over before the block starts, that’s the Full Body MOT.
During training, yes. Vital Edge is one therapist working one-to-one, and seeing the same person for sixteen weeks is the only way anyone remembers what your calf was doing in March. You won't have to explain your history again at the start of every session.
No, even though you'll hear it everywhere. Lactate clears on its own within about an hour of stopping. By the time you're on a table on the Tuesday after a Sunday marathon, there's none left to move, and it was never what made you ache in the first place.
The theory doesn't hold up either. When researchers measured blood flow through a muscle during massage, it didn't go up the way the story needs it to. It was a small study, but it's enough to say the usual explanation is wrong. So Jonathan won't tell you it.
It's the muscle itself: thousands of tiny strains from running, and the repair that follows. That has its own timeline, which is what the Countdown above shows, and it isn't something anyone can massage out of you.
No. It works the same way for a half, an ultra, or long-distance training with no race at the end. The distances change, but the fortnight afterwards doesn't. Come with whatever's in your diary.
That's a different conversation from a maintenance session, and it has its own page. It covers what happens when something has been there a while, and what Jonathan will do if you need a diagnosis, a scan or a referral instead of a massage. Pain and injury.
Everything above is counted from race day, so tell Jonathan where you are when you get in touch.
Book a sessionOr start from where you are: something already hurts, or nothing hurts yet.
