I’ve been struggling for a while now with a dodgy arthritic knee but as is the law of these kind of injuries, the body starts to compensate for it and other areas start to break down due to the overload. In my case, my right ankle has begun to play up which, I think, is down to me putting more weight onto my right hand side to reduce the amount of weight going through my arthritic left knee. I noticed how pronounced it has become when editing a video I’d made for a social media reel.
It’s funny, we all go through our running career thinking that we’re the perfect athletes until someone points out your form errors. I used to spend a lot of time working on my gait but, here’s the thing, once I got it to what I thought was good, I stopped training it. Not conciously, but just sort of fell out of step with doing it. I fell off from my own advice to continually train it with drills etc to fight against it getting steadily worse and just as I advise others, it got worse.
Over time, as I’ve gone on running with an arthritic knee my gait as subtly altered. As I watched the video, my jaw dropped open, I was running like a shopping trolley with a wobbly wheel. I looked awful! To make matters worse, it wasn’t long after this epiphany that my right ankle started to suffer an overloading injury which further exacerbated how pronounced my faulty gait was.
In any annual plan there should be a period for off-season and during this period we should look to focus on rebuilding and destressing the body. Obviously, we wouldn’t want to stop training completely and do nothing, but it’s the off season in which we can start to look at rebuilding the body for the next season. Cross training, strength work etc should be a staple all year round, but in the off season they should become the focus.
It’s not just a great reset for the body, but for the mind too. The whole training shift can be a refreshing break from the training regimen and will set you up for the next season. For me, I’m in the perfect time to take my off season training. The mileage is dialled back and I’m always working on strength but I have put extra emphasis onto my ankles, knees and fixing that wobbly wheel on the old shopping trolley!
