Training for Trail Running: Caring for Your Body (Suggestions from a Physio)

00:00.00
Alyssa
Welcome to the Uphill Athlete Podcast our mission is to elevate and inspire all mountain athletes through education and celebration. My name is Alyssa Clark and I will be your host today. I’m excited to bring back Pete Dickinson one of our resident physios on the Uphill Athlete Team. Pete is here to help us break down common questions and concerns from trail runners and keep you happy healthy and out on the trails. So Pete, thanks for joining us.

00:30.62
Peter Dickinson
It’s my pleasure I love doing these and it’s ah these are topics very near and dear to my heart.

00:35.27
Alyssa
Well, what have you been up to recently we can give the listeners a little update.

00:41.90
Peter Dickinson
Well as most of us, I’ve been recovering from covid, but beyond that I sneak up in the mountains. I’m in the northwest in Washington state by the cascades and like many of us in the mountains dealing with the fires and limited access at times but I just enjoy the mountains and playing out there and yeah, get out as much as I can.

01:12.26
Alyssa
Awesome! Yeah I actually just had the chance I’d never been up to the goat rocks area and I just had the chance to go up there and it is absolutely beautiful.

01:24.40
Peter Dickinson
Yeah, right close the Pacific crest trail to which ah goes right? Yeah, which goes right through my town as well.

01:29.90
Alyssa
We were on it. Oh cool. Okay, yeah, we actually had the chance to run into Karel Sabbe who was out doing the pct records we got to run with him for about eight miles or so.

01:46.88
Peter Dickinson
Yeah, that was quite the fast record.

01:50.80
Alyssa
Just insane. Yeah, that would be an interesting case study to bring him on and see how he managed that.

02:03.30
Peter Dickinson
Yeah, well a lot of our listeners are managing you know their events and their goals and they have a lot of passion that they bring to the table, and like most of us they’re impatient when things go wrong and we ding ourselves up.

02:20.89
Peter Dickinson
And yeah, we want to maybe give them a little bit of insight into all that.

02:24.88
Alyssa
Definitely. So yeah, let’s get right into it with common injuries. What do you see happening for trail runners? What do you see the most and how do we prevent these injuries then we’ll get into how do you treat them.

02:40.53
Peter Dickinson
Yeah, so so it’s a long list right? trail running and all running is basically ah, you’re hopping on one foot with a rest period from the other foot pushing off and if you think about that the hop for miles and miles on one foot that’s a lot of load that’s really hard on your whole structure. So no wonder it takes so much time to expose ourselves to that activity to get good at it. You know you get good at what you do but there’s a lot of focus that goes into that. And I’m a big proponent of having coaching for that and that’s why I love uphill athlete because you guys are amazing. You make me have to work a lot less because most of the injuries are training errors. Your progression in what you add in distance, terrain, and intensity. You know our body only has about a 10% ability to adapt to load more than 10 percent. It tends to react and and break down and we’re always pushing that envelope and injuring things and the list goes on everything. It’s a lot of tendon injuries because you’re hopping on one foot ah there’s foot injuries planter fascitis I get asked a lot about tightnesses , the big one is spine care and in my work with our olympians in winter sport and and athletes of that nature. It’s ah, a lot of my care is basically just spine care because running is really hard on the back and it’s it’s fairly unrecognized. So yeah, those are.

04:31.28
Alyssa
I know it keeps going.

04:32.57
Peter Dickinson
Yeah mean we can go on and on but those are many injury sites that I get asked about a lot.

04:36.63
Alyssa
Okay, and then how do you or what are some of your I guess we’ll get to that further down of prevention. But how do you go about treating some of these injuries if they do happen because I think. I mean I always say that sometimes I get concerned because some of my clients I’m like no I’m not just giving you the same training. It’s just like slight tweaks every week because there’s a gradual nature where I don’t want all of a sudden like why is there a 6 hour run that I haven’t done a run longer than 3 hours before like if you’re seeing massive changes and variations in your training. That’s actually a problem because your body as you said that 10% can’t handle so it should be just be like incremental changes to be.

05:30.47
Peter Dickinson
Yeah I couldn’t agree with you more and like I said most injuries are training errors and so what I’ll do when I’m working with the patient is we’ll look back over their training in depth and pick out any of the nuances that have changed. It could be simply more stress in their personal life that adds a physical load to your emotional stress, work stress and so you have to be cognizant of that in your training progressions. But of course the classic is upping your time or mileage. Ah, significant amount or it could be more of a downhill run than you’ve had before things of that nature. So small changes over a long period of time is the name of the game. You want to be progressive to improve but training is a biological process and at the cellular level to change that takes time. So what we do is we have a training stimulus. Your body takes that stress and does this really cool thing. It’s called Mechanical transduction. It takes that physical stress and turns it into a chemical reaction which then feeds back into our system and creates changes in the tissue to be a little bit stronger. And that’s where we gain performance. So we got to let that process happen and it’s a slow process. And there’s two components to it. It’s the stimulus, the stress that we apply but then it’s also the recovery.

07:18.93
Peter Dickinson
The other half of the coin is where our body mobilizes resources to create change in that tissue and that’s maybe part of the process that we don’t give enough credence to and enough attention to that’s the other half of the coin here. And if we’re shorting our recovery. We’re not gaining the benefits of all the training that we’re doing.

07:42.11
Alyssa
Absolutely yeah I mean if you think about the percentage of time you have to recover versus the percentage of time that you’re running. You should be really focusing on recovery I mean that’s the majority of the time we aren’t running but most of us aren’t running you know half the day. , or at least we should not be for training purposes. So recovery is super key and we’ll definitely get into that more. But I want to dive into I guess probably the number one and then maybe we’ll get to the second injury I hear from runners. This is planter fascitis how I guess how does that occur and how do you treat it because I see this come up all the time in our group chats and things like that.

08:36.32
Peter Dickinson
All most injuries are training errors so plantar fascitis is no different. Ah, but it’s a sneaky one. It’s multifactorial because there are a lot of things that play into it making us susceptible. Ah, to having that arch pain but first and foremost training errors if you haven’t had plantar fascitis in your training and it develops. It’s most likely you’ve exceeded that 10% rule now things that predispose you to get it can be genetics. You know, blame your parents always you know, that’s yeah, good luck with that and because it could be your bone structure causes you to have a little bit more torsion in your lower leg forcing you into more pronation which

09:12.81
Alyssa
Always yep.

09:30.57
Peter Dickinson
Is stressing all those tissues. So there could be that it’s multifactorial so you had everyone’s individual in what’s causing their plantar fascitis. So I can’t give a global statement I’ll see people with spine injuries where the back of their leg is getting tightened up from the nerves getting activated and stimulated causing some micro tension that’ll create more attention through the lower leg pulling on that plantar fascitis, injuring that. So it’s your foot that’s killing you but it’s coming from your back. Also with training, we have little micro injuries center tissue which causes tightness in our tissue and actually is tightness in your fascia and like 60 or 70% of your force transmission going down your leg is transmitted through this fascia. It’s covering around all your muscle fibers and tissues and so when that gets tight it changes the force vector of the line of pull and that wigs out your plantar fascitis so you have to spend a lot of time rolling to create your training or fixing your training errors. And and doing that so there’s a lot of different causes. A lot of people want to go. It’s always my shoes. Yeah, you can switch out your shoes and reduce their effectiveness in whatever they’re doing for you and you should be cognizant of that.

11:04.26
Peter Dickinson
Have I listed enough things I could keep going maybe so?

11:05.50
Alyssa
No no, that’s great. So then how do you say someone comes into your office. It’s definitely plantar fascitis, what are you doing to help them? On the other side because I think that’s something people.
11:18.52
Peter Dickinson
Yeah, so right? How do we treat it? Well it depends on what the cause is so if we put them through some spine tests and we see that their nerves are activated and stimulated and then we can treat the spine if it’s a localized muscle tightness then we can do a lot of rolling which I like to do which helps, increase the temperature of the fascia releases. The bonds of the fascia. Increase more mobility that way people do better rolling for tightness than stretching in general little known fact. So ah, most of your restrictions are probably fascia oriented rather than just trying to.

11:59.83
Alyssa
Interesting. Yeah.

12:09.10
Peter Dickinson
Stretch length and a muscle. So yeah, we’ll do that. We’ll also go over their footwear and if we need to address that we can do that running form. Ah, and some folks are predisposing them to having foot pain then as always training errors have progressed too quickly.

12:26.91
Alyssa
Got you that makes a lot of sense I was always told to use a lacrosse ball that you put in the freezer. Do you.

12:37.15
Peter Dickinson
Who yeah well I mean that can get localized cold to the area pretty effectively. But we want to make sure like with the lacrosse balls that we aren’t creating more inflammation because we’re traumatizing the tissue and I should mention that probably one of the number one activities I do to treat planner fascitis is hip strengthening ah because you’re hopping on one leg repeatedly and this goes for most injuries of the lower extremity. You’re not strong enough for running and your hip. Controls the forces going down into your foot so single leg strengthening not double leg because right when you’re running you’re on one leg. It’s a one-leg activity and so you want to do single leg strengthen.

13:31.69
Alyssa
Completely. Yeah, I always recommend single leg strength and we’ll get into that more. Yeah, so that’s interesting. You said that’s something actually that’s interesting. So we get people who say.

13:39.70
Peter Dickinson
Yeah, your programs are great for that.

13:49.16
Alyssa
I just really dig into it super deeply because it starts feeling better but you were brought up that you can traumatize it more. What’s kind of that balance?

13:59.23
Peter Dickinson
Right? Yeah, you want to warm up the tissue. It’s a friction game so to resolve tightness through because of fascia tightness and irritation. The bonds that are formed in the fascia are temperature dependent and you increase the temperature, the bonds release. So it’s just a friction game with a little bit of movement in there. So that’s why rolling on balls. But maybe not bricks and foam rolls are great. We have small four-inch balls that are inflatable that like you can use volleyballs, basketballs something with just a little bit of give so it’s not too painful that you’ll actually maybe keep doing it.

14:57.63
Alyssa
That’s fair, this is maybe this is a little bit off the cuff. So maybe I’ll catch you by surprise. Running form, that’s something I’ve always wondered. It’s really controversial.

15:04.85
Peter Dickinson
Oh I love.

15:12.60
Alyssa
I’ve always leaned on the side of not changing things if they work. But that’s also great until it stops working. So I’m curious about your thoughts on tinkering with people’s running form and how you should be thinking about that.

15:31.22
Peter Dickinson
Well, it’s a tool right? And it’s in our quiver if we want to shift loads around to different areas or you can work on making their existing form more efficient and track work is great for that. But doing drastic changes in form like taking someone from a heel striker to a mid foot or fore foot striker is a difficult process and sometimes we think about the research tells us that we switch injuries from one area and put it in another area so there is that but it’s a definite tool that we we should be open about but to make big changes is a long and difficult process.

16:27.84
Alyssa
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because, you know I’ve had some people you know you get the whole movement of of born to run and all of that where everyone wants to be.

16:39.92
Peter Dickinson
Now you’re talking religion now. Okay, you have to be careful with that.

16:42.89
Alyssa
Oh man I know I have to be careful wherever everyone wants to be, you know a forefoot striker they all want to be up on their toes and I have a lot of people who will say like oh yeah I switch to toe running, it’s so much better. And then they have massive achilles issues or calf is used and I’m like yeah don’t do that please.

17:01.50
Peter Dickinson
Yeah I mean I like to be more highly evolved. But, maybe yeah writing form might not be the path for that.

17:13.46
Alyssa
Yeah I would agree so road running versus trail running. What do you see for different injuries that occur?

17:31.69
Alyssa
What are your recommendations for the kind of mixing in both?

17:38.20
Peter Dickinson
That’s a good question. They’re kind of totally different creatures aren’t they like trail running because the decrease ground reaction forces coming up. The impact forces are moderated a bit and there’s more variability in the movement and what’s coming through the foot and ankle and we like that when you have just the same thing over and over and over, ah it doesn’t give you a lot of variability in function.

18:15.15
Peter Dickinson
You become a one trick pony almost so ah yeah, that’s kind of how I look at it people because of where they live you know they’re relegated to more pavement running. And then I think you have to be actually smarter about the forces and the recovery because you’re going to have more microtears coming into your tissues from the pavement running forces are going to be coming up into your lower extremities in a quicker fashion more forceful fashion. So you have to be aware of that near recovery which affects your frequency and duration as well.

18:59.62
Alyssa
Yeah I just think it’s something I mean I always advocate when people say oh I’m always injured from running I’m like try trail running. It’s probably gonna work out better for you but some people just don’t have the time. So they’re stuck on roads or have to do it more? So I think it’s just interesting if like, a stronger awareness that road will have a higher impact on you at least different.

19:32.37
Peter Dickinson
Yeah, it’s a different creature for sure.

19:37.36
Alyssa
We’ve talked a bit about strength. But what are your recommendations for strength training for runners for preventing injury?

19:50.86
Peter Dickinson
Ah, well I really like progressing over a period of time all based on your comfort level with heavy loaded lifting because doing either a heavy deadlift or heavy sting legs step down or a squat helps build up the toughness in your tendons and tendons with they get a lot of repetition. They get a lot of impact and they need to be strong and it’s heavy loads that stress the tendons and the thing with all of us in endurance sports. We’re not really oriented on the strength towards a strength side of things but strength is your pathway to longer distances more fatigue resistance. And less injury, it also is a basic component of good health. Especially as we age as active individuals. So it’s going to keep us more injury-free. It’s going to keep us in our sport longer. And with more enjoyment I can’t emphasize enough the value of a strength practice in your life.

21:14.45
Alyssa
And what are some of your go-to exercises within that strength training that you like to see athletes doing?

21:23.12
Peter Dickinson
Ah, deadlift which is a hip hinge that emphasizes the back of your leg, your hip, your hamstring, your calf, your foot and ankle. We’d like to do that both in two legs because we can manage a lot of weight but then we also like to do it in 1 leg. And you can do either a step down or a single leg deadlift. There’s a bunch of exercises that you can do in one leg that prepare you for the first parts where you’re just pushing off of one leg. Be it trail running, road running, skiing, biking lots of activities. You’re pushing through just one leg at a time.

22:05.96
Alyssa
What about core specific or do you?

22:12.23
Peter Dickinson
Okay, so that the yeah so the other thing is to remember what I said is a majority of injuries I’m treating on the road with our elite sports teams our spine injuries and, so we want to have a strong core.

22:29.40
Peter Dickinson
And ah, a lot of heavy lifting involves having a really strong and tight core. A heavy lifting is a tension game. It’s a core game. You have to have a strong trunk to support the heavy loads and so heavy lifting promotes a good strong core. , doing an overhead press, an overhead lift. Also really activates your core in the most maximal fashion. All the studies show that so and as endurance sports a lot of times we’re not pushing weight overhead but we should. It’s really good also for our posture we have great, much better posture stability with performing an overhead lift now. Good posture is also important in long-distance running once you start collapsing and aren’t able to maintain a good platform. For your legs to operate underneath your performance really suffers. So there’s a bunch of reasons for having an overhead lift in your program. For core training a lot of people like doing a lot of planks and side planks. To keep our trunk rigid and strong. To get in the weeds here a little bit of Turkish getup for a movement core strengthening exercise is one of our favorites. A couple dance moves are involved in that. But that’s an awesome loaded activity and that covers a lot of bases just that one movement. So if I were to think about my core I’d be doing a Turkish getup overhead lifts and trying to pick up something heavy with good form.

24:15.26
Alyssa
Love it? Yes, yeah Turkish getups are no joke. They are very tricky. They’re hard to do right? Yeah, so definitely.

24:22.84
Peter Dickinson
Yeah it’s a whole-body exercise if you just have time to do one lift. It’d be the Turkish get up.

24:32.46
Alyssa
Definitely and have someone watch you do it that knows what they’re doing because there are a lot of ways to do it wrong.

24:39.62
Peter Dickinson
Well with all of this stuff. It helps to have a coach right? I said you know most of our problems come from training errors a coach helps you with that. It also helps you with form during movements and so that you don’t get injured during those movements you know as once you start adulting and you’re out of a team environment. Ah, you don’t have that staff of people to support you in your activities but we may be spending many many hours in a sport. but Unsupported. So It’s important to have a team around you to have a coach. Ah, to have mental health support and nutrition support. All these are you know, very helpful.

25:25.95
Alyssa
Definitely I mean Pete and I were talking right before this about the stronger and bigger well thoughtful you can build your team. The better you’ll do because these sports are not soul endeavors I think that we see that more and more and so the stronger your team is around you the more they can help in a variety of situations and I think that’s something I’ve been able to figure out a lot more is that as I’ve gotten further into the sport and strove for higher performances I need a team and I need to know when things are going downhill to access and activate my team to step in and help me so it’s super key.

26:21.18
Peter Dickinson
Yeah Alyssa thanks for sharing that you know there’s also a big community out there people that you can tap into and that’s what I love about the Uphill Athlete community and outdoor sports is we’re all out there because we love it. And a lot of people are struggling with the same things and it’s important to have that community around us that we can reach out to when we need to support others when they need it and that makes for a good life.

26:50.72
Alyssa
It does. Yeah I think it’s one of the best parts of it and that’s something I know personally is very important to me as I’ve had a lot of people step up and say let me help and that I try to do the same for others and Pete I know you’re very generous. With your time and resources as well. And so I guess it’s like hey we’re here. You know if you’re wondering or have questions at least I’m here, I know Pete’s here like uphill wants to support people. I mean that’s so much of why we do this is to help each other succeed. Which is really yeah, it’s I think community’s always been one of the most important parts of all of these sports to me and it’s nice to to know you have other people have your back and you have their back too.

27:43.15
Peter Dickinson
Yeah, the staff here you know we all want you to achieve your goals and and and help you along that and we get as much back from that in any way that we can help that we give out So for all the listeners. You know, please reach out with your questions and you know we have a real investment in you being safe and enjoyable about all your uphill endeavors.

28:11.38
Alyssa
Absolutely so this is actually a question ah that I think we’re seeing become more relevant is that as you’re getting into super mountainous races as you’re getting into longer distances. People are really relying on poles. So how do you see using poles. Do you see injuries coming from that more? So, yeah, I’m curious how that’s come up because I’m seeing it.

28:40.50
Peter Dickinson
Yeah, now that’s a great question. That’s a great question because there are two sides to that coin right? There’s a performance aspect of that. But there’s another side. You know as a physical therapist I always want people to express the highest function they can and not to be dialed down and blocked and prevented so I think a lot of hiking with poles when you don’t need to hike with a pole. You are limiting your other balance processes to occur. You know you’re relying on the poles too much so there’s that side and I whine about that and there’s that side of things. However, from what we know from a performance standpoint. , for the ultra hikers and when you’re doing it for long periods of time it helps ah shift some of the load to the upper extremities and help with the fatigue you would get in your legs so there’s benefit with that. Absolutely when you’re going for hours at a time. Racing when you’re using poles again your upper extremities to assist with some of the force production as well as balance and fatigue over a period of time. Ah, but then.

30:06.99
Peter Dickinson
If you haven’t been training that or you do put it at risk with your elbow and your shoulder coming into play for more injury so you get good at what you do? So if you’re going to be doing that at a quick pace you need to be training using them at a quick pace. And for sure strength training helps your fatigue tolerance and makes you more fatigue resistant. So you should be doing strength training for every extremity to support that tissue. So then it just becomes a training issue.

30:41.74
Alyssa
Yeah, no totally I’m actually a proponent of what you said about not using poles all the time because I think that there’s tremendous benefit to working on that leg strength, working on that core strength without poles. Also poles break and so sometimes you might be SOL at a race or another event because your pole broke. So I have a proponent of practicing with them I’m also a proponent of not always using them as the crutch.

31:19.14
Peter Dickinson
Yeah I’m on that side of the coin as well. It’s good to develop your capacities, safely to their fullest extent, and if you’re taking your ability to balance on one leg without assistance. You’re never doing that then I think that’s a lost skill that you’ll miss at some point especially since I’m just about to teach a fall prevention activity for seniors in a couple of days. So your single leg balance is really key but this population.

31:39.87
Alyssa
I agree.

31:55.23
Peter Dickinson
Different issues. Although we’re getting there.

31:56.50
Alyssa
Yeah, different issues. But, yeah, So one of the things that you’ve mentioned previously is tendonitis. So where do you see tendonitis the most in runners? Why does it occur and then. how do we try to prevent it?

32:17.72
Peter Dickinson
Okay, to be pedantic again. All injuries or most injuries are training errors. So your tendon injuries are no different. It’s usually because of an overload situation. You’ve exposed them to repetition or loads that they weren’t prepared for and my most common tendon injuries are achilles tendonitis but we’ll see it a patellar tendonitis as well. Super common. Ah, and so we’ve got to get that tendon stronger is the name of the game. It’s not getting it I mean we we’ll do mobility work and fascal work because that does feed into the tendon. But it’s if we can get them stronger and that’s really going to help. But if you’ve had severe tendonitis you’ve got portions of the tendon that are no longer tolerating taking load and that ship is sailed. They’re never going to like taking load. So what you have to do is get the surrounding fibers stronger to take the load and you won’t be painful as much anymore. And guess what to get something Stronger. You have to go through a strengthening process especially the achilles tendon. It doesn’t like to get strong right away so we start with isometrics doing a cafres hold and we start this process and then we start exposing it to more and more load doing it with just one leg.

33:48.49
Peter Dickinson
Longer period of time on and on until we get it stronger but I don’t like to rest these we want to get them stronger right? When you rest, you rot so now pull that away from the recovery discussions. But for tendons, we want to find a point where we can start loading them and then we’re off to the races to get them to get the areas around the damaged parts of the tendon stronger.

34:25.29
Alyssa
Excellent, yeah, that’s super helpful. Oh shoot I was going to say something. Yep, it’s totally, it’s gone. Maybe it will come back later? Yep, sometimes it just goes out the window.

34:42.33
Peter Dickinson
This is it. We’re covering a lot of ground here.

34:55.31
Alyssa
So recovery. We mentioned it at the top of the podcast. But what are your best recommendations for recovery? Why is this so important to training especially I think in running?

35:13.74
Peter Dickinson
Well like what we said before you have a training stimulus and we want to get all the benefit of all that energy we put into our interval day or a long run day. And we create a bunch of fatigue. We want to make sure that pays dividends. But if we just.

35:31.58
Peter Dickinson
Ah, launch right back into additional training without letting these systems. Recover we’re not going to gain the benefit of that stimulus and so we have the stimulus but we need our body to be able to have time to turn that mechanical stress to a chemical reaction and rebuild. Ah, the tissues were stronger so we had better performance. So, that takes time. Ah, but we can do some things to help that training is ah, really stimulating the sympathetic nervous system maximally and these are processes in our body that gears up all of our energy resources to producing activity. Now there’s another side of that coin. It’s called your parasympathetic nervous system and this is your repair and regeneration side of the coin and we want to get that side stimulated so that we get the benefit from the sympathetic stimulus now we can actually get that parasympathetic system geared up. Ah, through some specific things and a lot of it is through the vagal nerve stimulation and there are few things that we can actively do to stimulate the vagal nerve and that is number one is probably deep slow breathing, at about you know five or six breaths per minute. It’s a pretty slow rate breathing in slowly and exhaling even for a little bit longer period of time. Ah and that stimulates the vagus nerve. Which is really cool. The other thing is we have viral receptors deep in our tissue that are tied into that the parasympathetic nervous system and rolling on the foam roll or deep massage will also stimulate that activity. So I tell my athletes you know after that interval session. After that long run I want you to spend 10 minutes deep breathing as well as rolling and you’re then matching your pairing your stimulus with your sympathetic nervous stimulus with your parasympathetic nervous system support. And that’s how you can get the most out of your training.

38:02.69
Alyssa
Excellent I will add that to my toolbox of things to do after runs. So yeah, 10 minutes

38:13.46
Peter Dickinson
Yeah, do that after your big day, and doesn’t take very long right? And it actually feels good to do these activities so should be fairly reinforcing to get to it.

38:24.53
Alyssa
Excellent, no, that’s great I hope more runners take that well I do now remember somewhat going backwards to the tendonitis but also ties to recovery is that I think where a lot of runners especially newer runners or runners that are transitioning from a ski season a non-load-bearing activity is like I always say to them like you probably are very cardiovascularly fit I believe you I don’t have a doubt about that. But your tendons your ligaments are not ready for this type of load because running is such a heavy loaded sport and so I always get very concerned when I have runners who say want to do one hundred miler in their first year and they weren’t really runners beforehand or I have an athlete coming off of a ski season. It’s like well we’re going to have to back it off or bike etc because you’re just not ready for that load yet. And so that’s just something I wanted to add on of why we see tendonitis and why it’s so important to be really cognizant of what you’re doing and not just jumping into these. Massive runs even if you are cardiovascularly fit.

39:42.24
Peter Dickinson
Alyssa you bring up a great point there. I see that with our really good athletes who have sharpened up their incredible fitness to a really fine point for that activity and since I do a lot of skiing sports. I see them I get a lot of calls as they transition then into the spring season they go to Moab your first run is twenty miles on a sandy road because you have the fitness for that. But then you deal with, you know IT friction syndrome for the next three months ah yeah so something to be aware of you get good at what you do, but if you haven’t been doing that and that includes all the impact activity of running because you’ve been doing other activities at a high level. It still doesn’t fully transfer your fitness does your cardiovascular fitness but your impact and load tolerance is going to be different.

40:43.92
Alyssa
The idea of their first effort being a twenty-mile sandy running Moab just makes me cringe.

40:51.62
Peter Dickinson
Well yeah, it was a family member, and even though she’s a world class athlete things can bad things can happen.

41:11.10
Alyssa
I mean unfortunately, sometimes we have to learn of the mistake and to realize nope we can’t do that Got to be a little more patient.

41:24.19
Peter Dickinson
Can’t cure dumb but we can learn. Absolutely.

41:27.79
Alyssa
Yeah, well hopefully we’re not trying to cure that too much with athletes more just I think you said in the last podcast of curbing over-enthusiasm or something along those lines.

41:39.28
Peter Dickinson
Yeah, well, it’s a common affliction with runners and uphill athletes and that’s overenthusiasm syndrome. So yeah, that’ll get the best of us. It’s a good thing to have. But yeah needs to be managed.

41:57.73
Alyssa
Absolutely and I will be the first to say I have to check myself on that as well. Especially after big events or long events when you start feeling better. You’re like oh great I can just start adding things in it’s like nope your body takes a long time to recover.

42:16.25
Alyssa
And you have to be smart about it.

42:19.87
Peter Dickinson
You know personally I try to have most of my patients, clients, injuries first. So I’ve suffered through not being very smart at things. So hopefully I can learn from that.

42:34.72
Alyssa
I Hope we all can learn. Well Pete is there anything else you want to touch on or advice you have to offer?

42:45.52
Peter Dickinson
Ah, it’s amazing. What everyone is out there doing ah keep at it get support when you need it ask questions tap into the community.

43:03.35
Peter Dickinson
It’s very good to have a robust and active life and it pays dividends down the road. So here’s to a great end of summer season here. We’re going into and looking forward to the snow which we just had last night.

43:19.57
Alyssa
Oh nice.

43:22.27
Peter Dickinson
So yeah, best in health to everyone.

43:27.62
Alyssa
Thank you, well Pete you’re still doing consultations through uphill, awesome! Perfect. So awesome. Yeah, so if you’d like to schedule a virtual session or a conversation with pete.

43:34.10
Peter Dickinson
Yeah, yeah through uphill athlete you but you can get a hold of me on the uphill athlete page.

43:47.38
Alyssa
You can do that on the uphill athlete website and get to chat with him a little bit more. So thanks Pete for being on this was great of course. Thank you for listening to the uphill athlete podcast if you could rate review or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform that really helps us help as many athletes and outdoor enthusiasts as we can. It’s not just one but a community we are uphill athlete.