Managing Muscle Pain during Marathon Training by Matt Fitzgerald

Muscle pain is a normal part of the marathon training experience. No runner has ever completed a marathon without experiencing some muscle pain while preparing for it. Although muscle pain cannot be eliminated from marathon training, it can be managed—and it’s important to do so. Pain is, after all, a signal that your muscles are under stress. Failure to properly manage that pain can result in an injury that prevents you from even starting your marathon.

Here are four proven tips for the management of muscle pain during marathon training:

1. Ease into your training.

The primary cause of exercise-related muscle pain is “unaccustomed exertion”. In plain English, this means exercising harder than you’re used to. For example, if the farthest you’ve run recently is 4 miles, you’ll be a lot more sore after a 10-mile run than you would be if your longest recent run was 9 miles. So, one way to minimize muscle pain is to minimize “unaccustomed exertion” by building up your running mileage very gradually. Follow the 10 percent rule: Don’t increase your total running mileage or the distance of your longest run by more than 10 percent from week to week.

2. Listen to your body.

There are different degrees of muscle pain, and they convey different messages. Mild soreness the day after a run is nothing to worry about. But intense soreness or pain is a sign that your body is not ready to run again. Listen to your body when this happens and wait until the soreness subsides before you do your next run. While it can be frustrating to have to skip a day of training because of muscle pain, it’s a lot less frustrating than getting injured and missing your marathon because you ignored your body’s warning message.

3. Use cold therapy.

Easing into training and listening to your body will help you experience less muscle pain. But these measures will not prevent it completely. So, what can you do to spare yourself from the worst of the discomfort associated with the muscle pain experience? Cold therapy is still the preferred treatment for acute muscle pain. Applying cold to the site of muscle pain reduces discomfort safely and effectively by reducing blood flow, and the inflammation that comes with it, and by temporarily desensitizing the nerves. When runners think of cold therapy, they usually think of icing. Applying ice to sore muscles is a great way to treat muscle pain after you run. However, you can’t run with an ice pack wrapped against your thigh! So what can you do to reduce muscle pain during a run? Topical analgesics, such as Perform Pain Reliever from the makers of Biofreeze, allow runners to take cold therapy with them during runs. Perform works very similarly to icing. But instead of actually cooling the sore muscle, Perform Pain Reliever contains ingredients that create a sensation of cooling that eases pain by reducing inflammation and desensitizing nerves. Studies have proven that topical analgesics like Perform are effective in reducing muscle pain during exercise. Equally important is what they don’t do. The active ingredients in topical analgesics such as Perform Pain Reliever do not enter the bloodstream and therefore do not have any systemic effects that might affect running performance.

4. Avoid medicinal “crutches”.

Many runners rely on over-the-counter pain medications such as ibuprofen to manage muscle pain during marathon training. This is okay to do occasionally, when you’re especially sore, but experts say that daily reliance on such medications should be avoided. Research has shown that ibuprofen and acetaminophen slow the process of muscle protein synthesis after exercise. Post-exercise muscle protein synthesis is critical to muscle regeneration after workouts.

A Tip for Race Day.

What if you wake up with muscle pain on the day of your marathon? Don’t panic. You’ll be in good company if you do. According to a recent scientific survey, more than one in five runners has lingering muscle pain from training on the day of a marathon. Obviously, you can’t start a marathon with a serious overuse injury. But if it’s only the usual soreness you’re feeling, just treat it the same way you treated muscle pain in your workouts: Rub some Perform Pain Reliever into the affected area before you start and ice it afterward—perhaps while celebrating your successful marathon finish with a bowl of ice cream or a glass of champagne!

Matt Fitzgerald is a prolific endurance sports journalist and author or coauthor of more than 15 published and forthcoming books on running, triathlon, fitness, nutrition, and weight loss, including Brain Training for Runners and Racing Weight. Fitzgerald also writes for Competitor, Triathlete, Inside Triathlon and Competitor.com.