As an athlete approaching the age of 40, I frequently have to pull out all the stops to keep myself feeling limber and prepared for my training.  It seems awareness of the importance of self-care is growing, as illustrated by the increasing number of articles I’m seeing in publications like Runner’s World, Running Times, and Competitor on the subject.  The concept of “pre-hab” seems to be all the rage, and I hope to get into this in more detail in future posts as it is a topic of great interest to me.  As a start, though, I’ll tell you about some toys I’ve collected over the years to help me in my pursuit of approximating that 18-year-old body that probably could have handled the training I want to do a whole lot better than this 39-year-old one can.

With some basic proficiency in self-massage techniques you can help yourself out by preempting overuse injuries, or by working them out as they are starting to occur.  In my view, self-massage should be a regular part of a runner’s daily routine.  Prior to a run, it can be used to even out asymmetric muscular tensions that occur because of all the non-running things we do in our lives: sitting at a desk, commuting in the car, carrying squirming toddlers around, etc.  These imbalances affect our running gait, which can cause strain over thousands of steps.  After a run, it’s a great way to make sure everything feels healthy, and to help things recover if they don’t.