Everyone plans the race.
Almost nobody plans
the fortnight after
It starts with a few days of going downstairs sideways. The soreness is the part that ends first.
It starts with a few days of going downstairs sideways. The soreness is the part that ends first.
A training block is not one question, it is a different question every few weeks. Pick where you are: race day is the line, and the answer changes side with you.
The mileage is lower than it is going to be and nothing is complaining yet. There is more room here than at any other point in the block, which is the only thing that 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 is the one question the practice gets asked most. Forty-eight hours is the floor: anything deep enough to be worth doing is deep enough to want a day or two to settle. Worked to the event rather than to the mileage.
Not nothing, and not a session. Anything that goes deep this close has no time left to settle before you have to run on it. Light work only.
Soreness peaks somewhere between one and three days, and this is the stretch where the body is doing the work rather than you. Most of what hurts now is not waiting on pressure to fix it. If something is out of proportion to the race (pain far past ordinary soreness, a limb that is swelling, or urine that has gone dark), that is a GP question and not a massage one. The whole back of the legs, and it is not subtle.
By now most people are moving again, and the evidence is that moving beats sitting still for getting the spring back. The race tends to leave the same things behind it leaned on: a calf that has not let go, a hip flexor that has been short since the twenty-mile mark. Calves, Achilles and hip flexors: the same three, still.
Mileage is coming back and speed work is usually still a fortnight off. This is where the question changes again: from what the race did to you, to what the next block is going to ask of you. Blood markers settle inside a week or two; the tissue itself takes considerably longer, which is why this point feels better than it is. Whatever the return has turned 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, the mileage is climbing and nothing hurts. Six weeks out, the long runs are the longest they will be. Race week, the whole question changes from what you can absorb to what you can afford to disturb. Treating those as one appointment with a different date on it is how a block ends early, which is what the arc above is laying out.
Through a build, yes. Vital Edge is one specialist working one-to-one, and the same pair of hands across sixteen weeks is the only way anybody remembers what your calf was doing in March. You are not re-explaining your history at the start of every session.
No, and it is the most repeated sentence in this industry. Lactate clears on its own within about an hour of you stopping. By the time you are on a table on the Tuesday after a Sunday marathon there is none left to move, and it was never the thing making you ache in the first place.
Nor does the explanation survive being measured. When blood flow through a muscle has been recorded during massage, it has not shown the increase the whole story depends on: a narrow finding from a small study, and enough to say the mechanism is not what the industry claims it is. So you will not be told it here.
The muscle itself: thousands of small mechanical strains from the running, and the repair that follows them. That has its own timeline, which is what the arc above is describing, and it is not a residue anybody can push out of you.
No. The arc is the same shape for a half, an ultra or a long-distance build with no race at the end of it: the distances change and the fortnight afterwards does not. Come with whatever is in the diary.
That is a different conversation from a maintenance session, and it has its own page: what happens when something has been there a while, and what Jonathan will say if it turns out to need a diagnosis, a scan or a referral rather than an hour on a table. Pain and injury.
The arc above is counted from race day, so it is worth saying which day you are on when you get in touch.
Book a sessionOr start from the situation rather than the sport: something already hurts, or nothing hurts yet.
