24th April 2025
With Marathon season on the go and the London Marathon coming up, more and more runners are looking to continue to train through those aches and pains that come with training on the road!
Did you know we now have the option of both rental and lease options on our treadmills. Why not rent your machine out to the local running community as an additional source of income?
Meet Jonathan
“I’m a 67 year old runner, I’ve completed about thirty marathons and six ultramarathons up to 100 miles. I have run for decades but only started entering races in 2005 and I ran my first marathon at 51 years old.
I started using the AlterG in May 2021. I developed a badly bulged L4/L5 disk in my lumbar spine in December 2020, a legacy of my work installing large sound systems which involved decades of heavy lifting. An MRI scan showed the displaced disk went about 80% of the way across my spinal column and caused very bad sciatica through my left buttock and down my leg.
I started physiotherapy at Balance Performance, who have treated all my running injuries for over a decade. Initially I coudn’t always walk across the room when getting out of bed in the morning but I persevered with all the
prescribed exercises until I could walk regularly for increasing distances, sometimes battling the pain or discomfort. My physio Joe then started me on the AlterG about six months after the initial injury. I was very nervous the first time but kept the body weight loading at about 65-70% and started with a run/walk session. I quickly built up the time and distance and it was fantastic to be able to run at a decent pace when my back wasn’t ready to take the load outside.I progressed the time on the AlterG up to two hours for the long sessions and also progressed the body weight loading as my body grew stronger. Interestingly I could arrive for the AlterG session in quite a lot of discomfort but as long as I started very conservatively any pain would always go away after typically ten to fifteen minutes or so.
After the session I was almost always completely pain free, felt fantastic and could walk for several hours. It shows the value of movement in the healing process. The AlterG is a huge amount of fun. It can be a bit of a fantasy world as I can run at speeds I can’t get near outside. The overspeed training has a useful place in getting the heart rate up when desirable and I refer to equivalence pace charts for the various body weight loadings. As well as the injury rehabilitation it is also very useful for recovery from hard sessions, I can do a fast tempo or interval session and not get anything like the muscle soreness I would get from a regular treadmill or outdoor session.
The non running back specialists I saw advised me to stop running completely for good and take up other sports. The ones who were used to dealing with athletes said – well, maybe. In August I had a steroid injection in my back. It’s not a cure for the back mechanics but it switched off the sciatic nerve pain instantly. Enthusiastically I went back to running outside too soon and too far. I had a lot of muscle wastage in my left leg from the constant nerve irritation. It couldn’t take the load and my knee blew up with the swelling going all down my lower leg from the overproduction of synovial fluid. Ths time Iwas diagnosed after another MRI scan with Patellofemoral Osteoarthritis, with worn away cartilage between the patella and femur on the lateral side.
Once again the knee specialist, a top expert whose opinion I valued highly, advised me to give up running. It took months more rehabilitation and cross training before I could start running once more on the AlterG in early 2022. Again I built up the time, distance and weight loading and as I write this in July 2022 I am back in marathon training, mixing outdoor running up to two hours, treadmill work, AlterG sessions and cross training on the stationary bike. When I overdid the outdoor sessions another injury would flare up for a little while as my body got used to the full loading, I had minor gluteus medius tendinopathy and an adductor strain but I got over them all relatively quickly.
The back and knee issues will always be present but I am currently effectively uninjured after eighteen months of struggle, never giving up. I still use the AlterG a couple of times a week and I don’t think I could complete a marathon training programme without it. For a typical session now I start at anything from85 to 95% body weight loading and progress to 100%, when it becomes almost like a conventional treadmill. Even when the AlterG is only providing a few percent of loading help it still makes a significant difference to the toll on my body and recovery time afterwards.
“The AlterG has been a revelation for me and I’m not sure how else I could have come back from such serious injury conditions to running regularly again.”