By the time the cross country season kick started my level of endurance had already sky rocked quite significantly thus i coped quite well with the training especially since we ran about 6km instead of 5km. However it was not after long that i started getting a strange feeling that something sinister was going on with my right leg. I pretended i did not feel anything and continued training for three more consecutive weekly sessions.
Unfortunately i could not make it into a few other following sessions as it turned out that i sustained the so called shin splints (medial tibial stress syndrome).
Shin splints is basically an inflammation of the bone tissue, tendons and muscles surrounding the tibia. The pain typically occurs along the inner border of the tibia where muscles attach to the bone. This was exactly what was the case with my poor right leg.
The cause of the injury was clear. The fact that i have never done an activity as strenuous as cross country before but then overtrained at the beginning constitutes the reason why i sustained this dreadful injury. Accordingly, i should have prepared with less strenuous and easy jogs or preparatory exercises and then gradually increased the intensity till it reached the standard i aimed for. My muscles were not quite ready for the sudden high-pressure activity like this and so got overused that they could not bear the pressure. The major problem was that i wanted to get quick results even when i had only just started the activity.
Having gone to the gym on a daily basis to run 5km plus the training sessions that we attended three times a week where i ran 6km are a valid account for the mess that i got my leg into. All that was left for me to do was to give my leg a period of recuperation before resuming the training sessions. That was highly imperative because shin splints are so dangerous that if not taken into consideration can develop into a full-blown stress fracture of the tibia which would take months to recover.