Days 67 and 68 - Stretch.

Day 67 was one of those days.

Know what I mean?

You gear up for a run, you've got the right music playing, the time is right, the scenery is beautiful...but your legs feel like lead pipes.

No matter how you try to make it work on a day like that, there is just no way to salvage the run. I tried giving my legs more time to warm up, I tried kicking into high gear on a hill, I turned up the music. I gave myself a mental pep-talk.

In the end, I gave up at 3.5k

In light of that, I decided to forego running yesterday, on Day 68, even though that would normally have been a marathon training day for me. My best guess about Day 67's performance is that I hadn't sufficiently recovered from my runs earlier in the week. I had been running relatively little (i.e., only doing my weekend long runs most of the time) in the few weeks leading up to my landing in Vancouver, so maybe so many runs in a row was a bit much. Instead, I extended my walks to and from work yesterday (which worked out nicely because I would have arrived at work far too early otherwise) and when I got home, I did a thorough head-to-toe stretch.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I think stretching is relatively under-appreciated by athletes and weekend warriors alike. I know that it's generally the first thing I cut out of my workout schedule when I'm short on time. I'm likely to toss my stretching routine out the window if I'm tired, hungry, or in a hurry, despite the aggressive flexibility training programs I was heavily engaged in as a child and adolescent.

It's pretty telling that this stretching subreddit (you know I've got to bring reddit into almost every post), which has been around for a year, has had zero recent activity. This one boasts a single post.

Yet, despite an apparent almost-complete lack of interest in the general population, there is no dearth of research demonstrating the beneficial effects of regular stretching.

Stretching is an important component of injury prevention.

Female athletes who participate in an injury-prevention program, a crucial component of which is stretching, reduce their risk of ACL injury, a notoriously-common injury in women who take part in team sport. Increased hip and lumbar spine flexibility, gained through stretching, appears to reduce the risk of rib stress fracture in rowers. Soccer players benefit from dynamic stretching, gaining increased hip range of motion, increasing their chances of scoring and decreasing their incidence of injury during games.

The authors of this systematic review tentatively concluded that stretching interventions can reduce the incidence of workplace injury (the authors of this study agree), though they admit that research of a higher methodological calibre is needed before strong recommendations for stretching programs can be implemented. Young people in the military experience less anterior knee pain when they engage in a simple stretching program, and this finding can likely to be extended to individuals engaged in recreational sport.

Stretching can also work as part of a treatment plan for common injuries.

This guy is worried that flexibility may ruin his deadlift.

The authors of this study found that stretching and yoga were equally effective in treating notoriously-intractable chronic low back pain, and both were more effective than an instructive book on self-care. Stretching also seems to help with chronic plantar fasciitis, a painful inflammation of the bottom of the feet that affects many recreational and competitive athletes. Though more research is needed, these authors concluded that stretching may play a role in the rehabilitation of hamstring injuries.

The benefits of stretching are not just physical. 

The authors of this study found that healthy, middle-aged participants in a stretching program demonstrated improved executive function, as did participants in a cycling program. Measures of selective attention showed greater improvement for the stretching group than for the cycling group. Older adults who participated in a stretching program improved their balance, decreasing their risk of falls.

Some athletes (particularly lifters, in my experience) worry that stretching will reduce their overall performance.

In fact, the authors of this meta-analysis found no detrimental effect of static stretching on muscle performance as long as stretches weren't held longer than 60 seconds. The authors of this review came to the same conclusion; they also found that performance in certain activities (particularly low-velocity activities) improve with static stretching, and performance in a number of activities is improved by dynamic stretching.

Unfortunately, the benefits of stretching don't include a decrease in delayed onset muscle soreness, which might have something to do with how few of us are motivated to stretch regularly...