The best cure for a bad back

Over the past few days my back has slowly been becoming more painful. I'm OK when sitting down, but as soon as I stand up and, more importantly, try to bend my back forwards, I get a pain on the lower left hand side. It's not an agonising pain, but enough to make it difficult to envisage running.

I woke up this morning realising that the pain was there. I'm nothing if not bloody minded, so I drank lots of water (my #1 favourite cure for back problems), stretched it out and took a couple of caplets of Ibuprofen (or Vitamin I as one of my friends likes to call it). I'm not one to advocate medication - usually I wouldn't take any, and just deal with the pain - but with back pain half the problem seems to be the tension the pain itself causes - getting rid of the pain temporarily, gets rid of the tension which can then get rid of the original pain.

While I waited for them to kick in I had some Ribena (for sugar) and honey nut bran flakes (for slightly more complex carbs) and finished off planning my training for the marathon. It's nothing too complex, just a table with specific commitments written in (so that I know if I couldn't do a run on a particular day) and a vague plan for my running. I've decided to make Wednesday my key evening for running because (a) that means I can legitimately nip off home early on a Wednesday evening (I'm aiming to run a marathon distance in March, so I'd better start pretty soon after 5:30 or I'll be running till bed time!) and (b) I don't tend to do much on a Wednesday evening, so it doesn't interfere with my social life. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays are still reserved for Frisbee and Monday and Saturday for shortish runs (with Saturday planned for 5-8 miles and Monday for 4 miles).

Anyway - the run. Eventually my back felt improved enough to leave the flat. Since I was still in a little bit of pain, I decided to go for a short run up to Oakwood, rather than the planned medium one. I set out at a reasonable pace - it was absolutely freezing though, so I figured I'd get out of breath quickly and have to slow down. It really is a bad year to get into the marathon, because it feels like the Winter's going to be absolutely freezing - and that really hurts at the start of runs, and towards the end of long runs.

By the time I got to Oakwood, I'd just about started to warm up a little. Looking at my watch I found I'd go to the half way mark in about 14m30s - a full minute faster than I'd got out there on my two previous runs (admittedly one was at the start of a long run, but the other was exactly the same route). I had started to struggle towards the end though, so the return journey was always going to be a bit painful.

Or so I thought. In the end it didn't feel nearly as bad as I'd expected and I even managed to make a fairly quick run up the final hill. The end result was that, without really trying to sprint towards the end (I used to do that, but now I don't want to risk injury), I clocked in a return time of under 14 minutes. That's right - significantly faster on the way back than on the way out AND that was having pushed on the outward journey. Checking back in my running history, it's the second fastest run I've ever done to Oakwood - only four seconds off of my fastest time.

And my back felt fine.