RICE, it feeds the world and also helps prevent injury. We are of course talking about two different types of rice – but this is something that I didn’t catch onto straight away when people told me that you need to RICE tweaked muscles. So for those of you wondering ‘What is RICE?’, I shall explain to the best of my abilities what it means.

RICE is an annoogram for the four things you should do straight away if you injure yourself running. Personally I only ever get round to doing one – but luckily I’ve managed to avoid any serious run-stopping injuries so far.

R is for Rest. I’m pretty good at this one. If you’ve hurt yourself, have a few days off. Even if it’s a minor muscle tweak like the one I’m carrying at the moment, a few days off won’t make a huge amount of difference to your training but a full-blown injury will.

I is for Ice. Put some ice in the form of a bag of frozen peas or a ice pack on it as soon as you get home (put an old T-shirt round it first or you could ice-burn your skin). You should keep the ice there for 10-15 minutes to reduce swelling and help the healing process. And you’re supposed to do this five times during the day leaving 45 minutes between ices.

C is for Compression. Pull on a tubigrip or a compression bandage.

E is for Elevation. This is the one I’m good at – putting my feet up! Make sure the affected bit of you is elevated to level with or higher than your heart. This is also supposed to reduce swelling. I tend to keep it up for about the length of time it takes me to drink a cup of tea and watch an episode of Frasier.

On Tuesday night my planned run got cut from 5 to 3 miles because of a funny feeling in my inside right ankle. I’d felt this at the end of Sunday’s fast 5.5 miles so pulled up early, got the peas out of the freezer and turned on Frasier. Since then I’ve not run so we’ll see what happend tomorrow. Fingers crossed everything will be ok for the half-marathon a week on Sunday. I’m now officially on my taper. Hooray.