How To Increase Your Running Mileage Without Getting Injured
A limiting belief I’ve told myself for over a decade is that I can’t run high mileage without getting injured. (I started to try once, when I first got to college, and…got injured, with a stress fracture, after increasing from 25 miles a week in high school to 50 miles a week, within less than four months).
Three months ago, when covid wiped all of my races off the calendar for a few months, I figured it was time to go for it again, using all the information I’ve gathered over the years from reading running books, and observing my training and others’.
“What did I have to lose?” I figured.
This week’s training stats of 80 miles of running (along with 53 miles of biking and a couple hours of strength training) exceeded my goal of hitting a 65 mile week (after hovering around 45-50 most of my athletic career).
Looping through trails may not lead to a cure for cancer, (though I am learning quite a bit about cool topics like neuroscience, social psychology, grit, and motivation from my self-help audiobooks), but it has allowed me to expand what I think is possible, a discovery I’m confident will flow over into other parts of my life in a positive way, and inspire my daughter, too.
And while this piece of running mileage is setting me up for a potentially excellent season, if I get so fortunate as to safely have one), it’s done that much more than that for me. It has proven to me that I can focus and get more organized than I thought I could, resulting in accomplishing more than I thought possible (at least for the disorganized, monkey-minded, stress fracture-prone me, who, even if her body could handle the mileage wasn’t sure her mind could).
Tips for increasing mileage:
- only increase mileage by no more than 10% each week (so if you run 30 miles in one week, only add up to three more miles the following week)
- so the two weeks up, one week down method: incrementally increase your mileage for two weeks by 10% each week, and then decrease by 20% for a week before building on to the previous weeks total by 10%
- proactively schedule and self-care, such as dynamic stretching before your run, static stretching after, doing mobility work, foam rolling, and putting your feet up the wall
- eat plenty of nutrient-dense food and always have a water bottle nearby for adequate hydration
And if you start to feel rundown, in the words of my Georgetown track coach, “When in doubt, take a nap“ or a day off from running.