Before I trained yesterday I had knee pain and was feeling pretty tight and sore.  It’s only some muscle tightness pulling on the connective tissue around the knee cap, but it afflicts quite a few runners.

The way I deal with runners knee pain is to make sure that I warm up enough and then do some specific muscle loosening exercises.

I use the foam rolling exercises showed you in the video clip here and some trigger point work by lying on a golf ball.

The area that has become particularly tight is my left ITB (a large area of connective tissue that runs down the outside of your thigh.  Also my right VMO which is a small muscle just above the inside of your knee.

Using the golf ball to apply pressure I am able to get the muscles in the area to ‘switch off’ and relax which reduces the amount of tension in my knee, I usually do this type of workout at home on the floor whilst watching television.

So after the warm up and resistance workout my knee felt ten times better and was only a little tight the this morning.

Anyway on to today’s time trial.

We ran the first mile in 9:36 as an easy warm-up.  The fast mile we completed in 8:10 and then the last cool down mile took 9:19.

Not exceptional but a steady 9 min mile pace.  If we’re to get in under our two hour goal we’re going to need to match that for the full distance.

This Sunday we are doing a 9 mile as fast as possible time trial which I hope we can get close to maintaining a 9 min mile pace for.

I’ll obviously keep you posted.

Don’t forget to download your free day by day blueprint here

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Had a really good recovery today, after 5 days in a row it was nice to give the body a little bit of a rest.

I did another foam rolling session and some trigger pointing with a golf ball (more on this another time), whilst Sarah (my wife) went out and did 3 miles.

She’s a little behind with her training having only returned home last week and done a little running with me on the Sundays.

Tomorrow is a fast as possible 7 mile run so we’ll see how that goes.

Don’t forget you can download your own half marathon program here

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Today’s training went really well on my 9 week half marathon programme.

It was time to repeat the resistance programme I did on day 9.

It took me less than 40 minutes to complete (about 39:45 to be precise).

I warmed up for 3 minutes on the treadmill.
Completed a 3 minute foam rolling session (see my video at the end for details of what is involved).
Then completed the three circuits of my resistance programme with a perfect 90 seconds rest between each set.
Finally I had time for a really quick three minute cool down on the treadmill before jumping in the shower (I often save some time and stretch in the shower – but I’m a bit odd like that!)

Tomorrow is back to the non running interval programme.

Here’s my video explaining the benefits and my favourite 5 foam rolling exercises.

Don’t forget you can still download your own free half marathon programme by **clicking here**

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