Goal 2 - Improve Impact Resistance

A typical runner takes around 42,000 steps during the course of a full marathon. Depending upon how efficiently you run, you are placing somewhere between 1.5 and 4 times your body weight on your leg muscles and joints with each step. Taking an average of 2 times your body weight, the muscles, tendons and joints of a 150 pound runner will absorb almost 13 million pounds of impact during a marathon! That is a lot of stress even for the most efficient and advanced runner.

Improving the ability of your muscles, tendons and bones to withstand all that stress is one of most critical goals of marathon training. For a beginning marathon runner the best way to improve that ability is by gradually increasing the distance of your weekly or biweekly long run. More advanced runners can further improve their impact resistance by adding in some higher intensity plyometric drills. Plyometrics are exercises such as bounding, hopping and jumping in which a rapid eccentric contraction or lengthening of your muscle is followed by an explosive concentric or shortening contraction of your muscle. Plyometrics should only be performed by athletes with a good base of muscular strength.

 When your muscles and tendons are placed under stress they breakdown slightly. They respond to that minor damage by rebuilding themselves even stronger than before. That is why you get stronger through progressively harder training. You should let your body adapt gradually to the increasing distance of marathon training. If you try to do too much too soon, breakdowns occur at a faster pace than the rebuilding and strengthening process can keep up with. At that point you begin to suffer from overuse injuries. Common overuse injuries such as shin splints, stress fractures and muscle strains are often times cause by too rapid increases in distance. Increasing the distance of your long runs at a moderate pace will build your impact resistance without causing injuries.

Continue to Improve Muscle Elasticity

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