Stop the Madness

I’ve got a problem. I keep falling down when I go out for runs. Now this isn’t a new problem. If you read enough of my race reports, you’ll see that this has been going on for quite a while. Typically though this has been limited to races. The only times I can remember hitting the dirt (or pavement) during my daily training runs has involved ice.

Over the past couple months though, I’ve managed to trip and fall three times when out running. Each time the trail or road was fairly flat and ice was no where to be seen. The last time was about a week before Phunt and I jacked my knee up good enough that I took a couple chill days to give it some extra rest.

I finally reached my breaking point during Phunt where I ended up eating dirt not once or twice, but three separate times. With each fall being progressively worse. Listen, you run enough technical (or even semi-technical) trails and you’re eventually going to trip. You’ll get distracted by messing with your pack, grabbing a drink, or even checking out a funny looking log beside the trail and catch a toe. This should result in a trip, couple stumbling steps (maybe with some windmilling arms through in), and then you catch your balance and continue running. I’m going straight from trip to splat with no intermediate steps. Do not pass Go. I never seem to have time to catch myself. And it’s not like I’m flying along and have a split second to react. I’m barely moving along most of the time.

After some thought, I’m self diagnosing my issue as a weak core. My balance isn’t the best so it’s fairly obvious I have some imbalances. Now I have no training or expertise to really say for sure what or where my issue is. So my solution will be to throw a bunch of workouts at my core and hope this fixes the issue(s).

My Core Strategy (pun obviously intended)

• Hip mobility stretches – before each run
• Pullups, pushups, planks, crunches, lunges – various, 5 min per day
• 100 ups – 5x per week
• Foundation Training workout – 3x per week

I can’t really recommend the 100 ups exercise enough. This has been my go-to exercise over the past 5 or 6 years whenever a little niggle has gotten annoying. After about 2 weeks of consistently doing this, it’s typically gone away. My balance has sucked for quite a while and I know I should have been doing this to help even out some of my imbalances, but it’s just never seemed important enough to spend time and effort addressing.

Frankly, I know I should be doing some sort of core exercises 3-5 times per week at a minimum, but I’ve been a complete slacker. I haven’t been injured and am not out to chase faster times, so spending time keeping my core in shape hasn’t seemed worth the effort.

Well, I’m tired of falling down so it’s time to start making the effort. The goal will be to do the above set of exercises for at least the next 2 months and then continue with a slimmed down version after that. I’m not good with periodic workouts (i.e. MWF) so will probably aim for a little bit each day.

And looking at the above list, I’m already wondering how long I’ll be able to realistically keep it up. Two months is probably a pipe dream. One month would probably be enough even if I have numerous cheat days. There’s a saying “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” and that’s kind of how I’ll treat this. Fingers crossed that I’ll be able to do enough to keep myself upright for the rest of the year.