Two Pints Of Lager And A Remedy For Shin Splints Please!

Thursday night is pub night for members of my local running club. An hour or so of Olympic standard training - or so we like to think - is recounted over a pint or two and even the odd bag of crisps for those who can justify it by having sweated out at least a bag’s worth of salt. Apart from putting the world to rights, three topics of conversation always crop up; runner’s knee, Achilles tendonitis, and shin splints. In my unofficial role as club sports therapist, questions about injuries always come my way - but at least I never have to buy a round!

One week, I was inundated with queries regarding shin splints. They all came from a group of runners who train together twice a week. Most of them are regular competitors in 10k and half-marathon distance races and they’re all seasoned road runners, clocking up an average of thirty miles a week, so the occurrence of shin splints couldn’t be put down to the legs suffering the shock of taking up a new activity - or could it?

Shin splints generally occur when:

• Legs unaccustomed to running are suddenly put under jarring pressure by a newcomer to the sport
• Seasoned legs are put under new pressure by a sudden or dramatic change such as increased mileage or faster pace
• The biomechanics or running gait of a runner, such as over-pronation, cause pressure

So why were a group of experienced runners all suffering similar symptoms at the same time? They each reported feeling pain in their shins when they started to run. Some said the pain eased off after a while when they were running but others said they could still feel the pain even when they were walking. All of them said their shins were painful to touch so there was no doubt they were all describing shin splints of some sort.

The mystery was solved when I discovered they’d all decided to have a break from pounding the roads and thought they’d do a couple of training sessions on the athletics track instead. One of them had found a training schedule used by some Ethiopian distance runners in a magazine so they’d used that as their guide. In short, they’d gone from years of steady paced running to an eyeball-popping session of 25 x 200 metre sprints with only a 30 second recovery between each one! What’s more, they were running on an entirely different surface - and athletics tracks are not kind to your legs. The change of pace, change of running style as they endeavoured to sprint repeatedly, and the change of running surface were explanation enough for the outbreak of shin splints amongst them but some had really put the icing on the cake by switching from their usual cushioned, supportive running shoes to a pair of borrowed, completely non-cushioned track spikes for the occasion.

Of course, I was happy to prescribe appropriate treatment for the price of a couple of orange juices but as for keeping quiet about their exploits…that was going to cost them at least a bag of dry-roasted peanuts!