Many of you will have ran a marathon and you will be fortunate enough to have experienced DOMS. Here’s how it works… You finish the marathon exhausted and innocently go to bed that night presuming things can only get better. However, the next morning you wake to find out they can indeed get worse. You slide downstairs on your arse as your legs are too painful to function but the worst is yet to come. Having managed to make it through the day, you once more you go to bed and the next day, now 48 hours post marathon, you wake to find that the whole thing has gone to an unimaginable level of severity.

Here’s what’s happened… During the marathon, you damage your muscle fibres. Repeated impact on the road causes tissue damage and that in turn initiated an inflammatory response. The response takes 24-48 hours to fully kick in and hence, you feel the effects 24-48 hours post-marathon, rather than at the finish line. That’s why it’s called ‘DELAYED ONSET of MUSCLE SORENESS’ … or DOMS.

Here’s the critical part to understand, what you felt 24-48 hours later was happening from the mid point in the marathon. Your body has natural pain killers to mask the effect, but understand that the damage did not occur 24-48 hours after the event, it happened during the race, you just couldn’t feel it at the time as adrenaline and other factors hide the pain and the damage as it’s occuring real time.

One of the most common blood measurements for muscle damage is creatine kinase (CK). In really simple terms CK is found in muscle cells, and if those cells become damaged and the wall splits open, it leaks into the blood. So if it’s high in the blood, you can presume a lot of cells are damaged.

If you’re interested in this stuff, google ‘elevated CK levels in marathon runners’. What you’ll find it that post-marathon, CK is for want of a better term… ‘through the roof’ due to tissue damage. Your muscles are smashed to pieces, leaking their contents into your blood… but don’t worry, you’ll feel that 24-48 hours later when DOMS kicks in.

Now, I know I’m waffling but here’s the point to make, damaged muscles will not function correctly (shocker!!). When we discuss the benefits of training, we always seem to focus on metabolism. We talk about aerobic energy, we use terms such as VO2 and lactate threshold, these are all metabolic terms and all related to energy production. We also talk about fuelling and taking carbohydrates on board, to maintain our energy levels.

But here’s the missing piece that nobody ever discusses. If your chassis collapses and your muscles are smashed to pieces, it makes no difference what your VO2 max or lactate threshold is. You will find yourself slowing down and potentially walking. You can take as many energy gels as you like, but putting fuel in a car when the wheels have fell off, is pointless. The tissue damage is probably why you walked at 18 miles. Hence the use of over-cushioned shoes and compression clothing which has become mainstream.

Forget all the above metabolic terms, the simple truth is that your legs need to be hardened to hitting the ground for the marathon distance or beyond. They need to be conditioned to the impact, or they will become damaged after only a moderate amount of miles. No amount of short duration / high intensity intervals to ‘boost your VO2 max’ can prepare your legs to hit the ground for 4 hours.

There’s an age old coaching term called ‘sports specificity’ … If you want your legs to be hardened to hitting the ground for 4 hours, then you need to build up to going out and running very easy for 4 hours. That’s one of the key benefits of high volume, low intensity training that is very rarely discussed. Admittedly this is aimed at marathon and beyond, it’s not essential for 5k.

Tissue damage due to lack of conditioning is a significant factor of performance that very few people discuss. There’s no shortcuts in training which can resolve the issue other than simple volume. Go and hit the road for a long period of time, if you want to get used to hitting the road for a long period of time.

**Side note… Are you running mountain races? You’ll need to apply the above to repeatedly running downhill, that’s a whole different level of muscle damage and you’ll be surprised to hear that to condition yourself to it… you’ll need to go an run downhill a lot.

Please don’t ask will ‘eccentric lunges in the gym’ work instead… I’m not interested, just go and find a hill.

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