- Home
- Recreation and Sports
- Running
- Cross Country has High Injury Rate
Cross Country has High Injury Rate
- By Gabe Mirkin, M.D.
- Published 12/31/2005
- Running
- Unrated
Gabe Mirkin, M.D.
Dr. Gabe Mirkin has been a radio talk show host for 25 years and practicing physician for more than 40 years; he is board certified in four specialties. Dr. Mirkin's latest book is The Healthy Heart Miracle, published by HarperCollins. He wrote the chapter on sports injuries for the Merck Manual (both lay and physicians' editions), the largest selling book worldwide with over one million copies in print. His daily short features on fitness have been heard on CBS Radio News stations since the 1970's. He has written 16 books including The Sportsmedicine Book, the best-selling book on the subject that has been translated into many languages. Dr. Mirkin is a graduate of Harvard University and Baylor University College of Medicine. A Boston native, Dr. Mirkin did his residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital and over the years he has served as a Teaching Fellow at Johns Hopkins Medical School, Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, and Associate Clinical Professor in Pediatrics at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. He has run more than forty marathons and is now a serious tandem bicycle rider with his wife, nutritionist Diana Mirkin.
View all articles by Gabe Mirkin, M.D.Cross country running has the highest rate of injuries of all high school sports. The injury rate is even higher for girls than for boys. The extremely high injury rate is caused by asking runners to train and race in the same week. Most coaches know that you have to run very fast in practice to run very fast in races and the fastest way to train is to run intervals or fartlak, a series of short very fast bursts of running interspersed with slow jogging.
Training is done by running very fast on one day, have your muscles feel sore on the next day, and not running fast again until your muscles feel fresh. The faster you run, the longer it takes to recover. Most high school runners take at least a week to recover from the soreness caused by a race. The coach typically takes them to a race on Saturday and asks them to run intervals on Monday or Tuesday, before they have recovered from the race. They are either injured by that interval session or else they are injured by racing the next Saturday, before their leg muscle have recovered fr
The most effective way to prevent injuries is for a coach to set up at least two teams. Let each team race on alternate weeks, so each runner races on one week and trains fast twice in the next week.
Dr. Gabe Mirkin has been a radio talk show host for 25 years and practicing physician for more than 40 years; he is board certified in four specialties, including sports medicine. Read or listen to hundreds of his fitness and health reports at http://www.DrMirkin.com