It's the same one every year, isn't it.

It's flared again and you're already annoyed. You know the drill. Two weeks off, a cautious return, and a countdown to the next one. Start here.

You've been cleared and you don't trust the leg. The physio ended, the notes said fine, and you still run the first mile listening to it. The gap between cleared and ready.

You've got a race and you're building. And you'd like this to be the year the build actually finishes. Training up without paying for it.

Strength training. Across sports, a meta-analysis of randomised trials found strength training reduced injury risk to roughly a third of the control rate, with a dose-response relationship. That's across sports rather than runners specifically, and I'll say so rather than quietly upgrading it — but it is by a distance the best-evidenced thing on this list, and it is the thing runners skip.

Cadence, honestly. Increasing step rate by five per cent reduces the energy absorbed at the knee by around twenty per cent; ten per cent takes it to about a third. That mechanism is well established. Whether it prevents injury is a much weaker claim — the best review found only two trials reporting reduced injury incidence. So: a good tool for a knee that's being asked too much, not a magic setting.

And the downhills. Braking is where the muscle damage actually comes from, and prior exposure is protective — the people who take the most damage from a descent are consistently the ones least used to descending. In Denver, where the spring transition tends to add distance, hills, terrain and altitude all on one Saturday, that matters more than it does most places. The longer version of that argument is on the hikers page.

Two things I'd gently steer you away from spending money on first: your running surface, which the systematic reviews have never established as a risk factor at all, and the acute-to-chronic workload ratio, which was heavily promoted for years and has since been fairly comprehensively taken apart.

Building blocks live in return to running, the glute work and balance and control. And if your winter was spent indoors, the treadmill piece covers what actually catches people in March — including the bit where I take back what I wrote about treadmills in 2008.

A 60-minute assessment first: the injury history in detail — and with a recurring one, the history is the diagnosis — what your training actually looked like in the four weeks before each flare, and then testing what the leg tolerates under single-leg load, under braking, and repeatedly rather than once.

Then one-on-one sessions of 45 to 60 minutes with me at the studio at 1800 Glenarm Place downtown. Mostly strength, mostly single leg, progressed against what your tissue accepts rather than against a calendar — alongside a plan for how the running itself gets rebuilt, because the running is the point and I have no interest in you doing rehab instead of it.

If what you've got needs a physician before it needs me — and some presentations do — I'll say so in the first half hour.