I suffered a stress fracture in my tibia after the Denver Marathon in 2006. While sitting around for eight weeks and recovering, I started thinking of what might have caused the stress fracture. The obvious reason was my ramp up in mileage, but I also did a lot of my running on the Cherry Creek Trail which is concrete. I always knew that concrete was harder than asphalt, but never thought about how that might affect a runner’s body.

Concrete is the hardest of the normal running surfaces and should be avoided at all cost. Take a golf ball and drop it on a concrete sidewalk and compare it to an asphalt road. The ball will bounce higher on the concrete. Asphalt is ten times softer than concrete, that blew my mind. I didn’t realize that it was that much of a differance. When you run, each time your foot strikes the ground it hits at the force of six times your body weight. If you do the calculation, you start to realize that running on concreate provides a punishment on your joints/bones/muscles.

I’ve noticed hat a lot of paths in the Denver Metro area are made of concrete. You have the wildly popular Cherry Creek Trail and the Platte River Trail. I wish that city planners would realize that concrete is not a suitable material to build a trail from.

I generally run on the roads and do my long runs on dirt paths. The one caveat of running on roads is that most roads are built on a camber. Now this also can cause problems. One of the most common running injuries is the IT Band Injury and most often times it’s the runners right leg. The right leg is more susceptible due to the bank of the road that runners often run, unless you run in the middle of the road. Thus, running on the streets also had it’s disadvantages and may cause back, hip and joint injuries.

Choose wisely.