Conflicting advice

One of the many perks of working at Google is the onsite massage. Every year on your birthday, you get a free one hour table massage to use when ever you like and last week I decided it was time to use my coupon. Among the many talented and experienced massage therapists, who specialize in everything from Swedish massage to prenatal massage, there is a sports therapist and it was with him I made my appointment. Let me tell you, this guy is a magician. I booked a chair massage with him a couple of years ago and though he brought tears to my eyes with pain, I left the room with a refurbished set of shoulders that shouldn't have been possible in just 15 minutes. I was really looking forward to seeing what he could do for my newly aching knees.

The appointment was pretty much what I expected. It wasn't long before he located the most painful spot on my quad and IT band, just beside my knee, and dug his fingers into the muscle, causing me to lose my breathe with the sudden pain. He taught me a bunch of new stretches and then, along with all the other advice, admonished me to, "Stay away from ice." This was a big surprise. Every book I've read so far, and the TNT coaches, have all agreed that icing your legs, especially your knees, after you run is a great idea. It reduces swelling, so they say, and the lactic-acid-filled blood that retreats from the cold is replaced with fresh oxygenated blood when you warm up. It is supposed to reduce pain and quicken healing. But, my sports therapist disagrees. He said that in Europe, where he was trained, no one ices their muscles and it's considered quite the faux pas.

Mostly I was surprised by this because among all the other advice that I've read online and in books, and heard from my trainer in the gym and the TNT coaches, icing is one of the only things they all agree upon. It seems that when it comes to running, there are a lot of differing opinions, about pretty much anything its possible to have an opinion about. Take the marathon plan for a beginner for example. The TNT training plan has us running just 3 times a week. It contains the least amount of running. But even with that, sometimes on a Thursday, track day, we don't run. We spend the time doing drills along one of the long sides of the track. And yet on the long runs, they increase the mileage faster than any other plan I've seen. Every second week we add on 2 miles. Much more than the 10% a week, at most, I've read about in other plans. These other plans advocate 4 and 5 days of running a week, with 3, 4 and 5 miles on the short runs and shorter increases in the long runs. Yet other plans focus entirely on the time you're running and make it clear that measuring the miles is a bad idea for a beginner. You should simply focus on time on your feet.

There are other disagreements too. When to stretch, what and when to eat, how to massage, how best to spend the critical 30 minute post-long-run time. And everyone who has an opinion, tells it like they're 100% sure that this is the only way to do it. Listening to them, you'd be entirely convinced. Until you ask someone else the same question. As a beginner it's hard to know who to trust and which of all the conflicting advice to take. I assume the sports therapist knows what he's talking about, but then shouldn't the running coach, someone who has coached lots of people to run marathons, also be trustworthy?

In the end, I choose some sort of mismash of all the advice. Trying a little bit of this and a little bit of that until I end up with something that works for me. With that, I ran 12 miles last weekend. So I guess I can't be going too far wrong.