Mostly because of my endless bitching, readers of this blog know that I'm somewhat injury prone. Frequently, this is unrelated to running, such as when I recently fell off of the bottom step and sprained my ankle. However, I also have a truly terrible habit of ramping up my mileage and speed too quickly and hurting myself that way.

I can't do much about clumsy, but you would think I could lick this other issue. The solution is really simple - just don't run as much.

I have something of a routine for this bad habit. I start out with great intentions. Most frequently, I'll start using the Couch to 5K plan, at least partly because it's one of the most conservative "beginner" plans out there.

I'm out on my run. I'm feeling good. I decide to run an extra 30 seconds more than it calls for during my walk/runs. I look at my mileage and start edging that up. I push it too much and then I'm back here on my blog, griping about my injury.

Nobody wants that.

One of my besetting sins involves distance. There's this rule of thumb that says that you should only increase your mileage by 10% each week. Let's just say that I interpret this rule somewhat loosely. I know full well, for instance, that if you take six miles and you add 1/10th of that distance on to the next week, you will be running 6.6 miles the next week. When I apply this rule to myself, I round it up. Do the math, and that actually works out to a 17% increase. Do this kind of thing consistently, and I do, and the research says that you're more likely to injure yourself. And I do.

So. I have added a handy little worksheet into my running log. It starts with my mileage from last week (6.3 miles), then for each week it increases my mileage by 10%. Another column divides that number by three (four for later weeks) to give me the mileage I should be running each day. Then I added in a column for me to enter the mileage I actually ran, with a final column to tell me how closely I matched the magical 10% increase.

I can already predict that this is going to annoy the hell out of me. I can predict this because I don't get a six mile run (at least if I divide my mileage evenly) until the week of June 28.

I'm going to try and stick to this. I am. Really. Careful. LY.