Profile

An insight into Jenny Blizard's professional physiotherapy and running career

Jenny has a large caseload of physiotherapy clients, 70% of whom are runners, cyclists and triathletes, and draws on her vast experience of balancing training and competing with the rest of life’s demands to help people return from injury stronger, as well as running regular classes in a variety of mediums aimed at educating athletes to be stronger, less stressed and achieve more with less effort.

It has taken well over ten years, though, from the beginning of Jenny’s career as an elite level runner, to meeting and being coached by Dave - also a former GB athlete - to qualifying as a physiotherapist, to where the clinic is now in 2015, and the story of how the couple have built on their shared experiences to achieve excellence in both their own competitive lives as well as helping others to do the same is a fascinating one.

Jenny has an astonishingly successful and varied background in elite level sport, including competing for GB in cycling, duathlon, triathlon and running, with the latter now being her main focus in training and racing.

She credits her mother Stella’s unrelenting support throughout her career for enabling her to train and compete at such a high level for a more than 20 years - she has paid for Jenny’s race entries and travel costs on countless occasions over the last two decades, gives her regular emotional and mental boosts, and is her biggest fan.

Her achievements in other sports are too many to list in one article, but include incredible PBs of 22:32 and 58:27 respectively for 10m and 25m cycling races, a fourth placing in the World Junior Duathlon Championships, and a 27th position in the World Triathlon Championships.

It is running, though, that Jenny has really excelled at, with her impressive PBs across a range of distances highlighting how successful a team Jenny and Dave were, and are, together.

The pair met back in 2006, when Jenny had already reached a very good performance level, having run a 16:45 5k the previous year.

However, she achieved that by having adopting the motto ‘the harder the better’ to her training, smashing out three hard sessions a week, as well as a long run every weekend, and never easing back properly for races.

This was a motto Jenny had applied all her sporting life, and by the age of 19 was training 24 hours a week. She acknowledges the negative connotations of such an approach, but has taken lessons away from her past and applied them to her work with athletes at the clinic ever since.

“I trained too hard too soon. With the benefit of hindsight and the lactate testing, if I’d concentrated on more threshold work I would have been a lot better.”

Despite placing in the top ten in the National road race series, it is highly likely she could have achieved even greater success, a fact she admits is painfully obvious looking back.

“I left it all in training. My legs were constantly hurting and I was mentally drained by the time weekend racing came around. Looking back, it’s clear some foundation years for the road racing would have proved very fruitful, and training to heart rate zones would have worked perfectly for the more controlled time trialling events.”

Returning to 2006, before her running regime was transformed by Dave, she was pushing herself so hard that she was beginning to dread training and racing.

It was on a chance meeting on a training run that Spring that their coaching relationship began, and the foundations of the Blizard Physiotherapy clinic’s core principles were built.

Working from his own experience of high level competition, having represented GB 14 times, Dave advised her she was doing too many hard runs and not enough base training.

After just three weeks of following Dave’s advice, Jenny began her incredible rise to the top

She knocked nearly a minute off her 5m PB at the Sale 5m, winning the race in 27:35, and feeling “in control, not forcing it, allowing the hard work to come naturally”.

Jenny explained the first few weeks under Dave were aimed at helping her to recover from years of abusing her body with too many back to back hard sessions, and, within six weeks, she had successfully increased her weekly mileage from 40 to 60 miles, with the gradual introduction of some double run days. 

Again, the pair emphasise how she was only able to increase her mileage without putting any undue strain on her body because she listened to everything he said, and followed his instructions.

Within six months she had earned her first GB vest, after recording the second fastest leg of the day at the National Road Relays in October, just one second behind running legend and current veteran international, Helen Clitheroe. 

Leading up to her GB selection, Jenny recorded yet more PBs, this time a 5000m time of 16:15 in the AAA’s European Trials after her first ever proper taper, an incredible 26:45 at the Notts 5m on a testing course, and another successful 5000m at a BMC race in the August.

Commenting on her 5m time, Jenny highlighted how it was down to Dave’s clear and informed coaching advice that led to her putting down such a huge competitive marker.

“It is undoubtedly the best race I have ever run”, she said. “My confidence continued to improve as I listened, trained and responded exactly how Dave predicted I would.”

As a direct result of Dave’s coaching methods, in 2006 she recorded PBs in distances all the way from 1500m (4:29.3), right up to 10k in the December of that year, when she knocked over three and a half minutes off her previous best with a lightening fast 34:08 for 10k.

However, soon after, Jenny began to experience fatigue symptoms that would take over a year to resolve, but ultimately contributed to her understanding of the role of stress and overall health in performance levels, knowledge she now applies in her position at the clinic.

Initially the chartered physiotherapist - who qualified in 2004 after six years of combining work as a sports massage therapist and another part time position as well as attending college classes - put her increasing levels of physical and emotional tiredness down to ‘not being tough enough’, and was close to throwing in the competitive towel.

However, after falling asleep while driving and blacking out at work, Jenny’s subsequent ECG and blood tests showed her Ferritin levels were very low (15) as well as her haemoglobin levels, proving that she had been wrong to question her strength of character but teaching her a lesson for the future that she now passes on to her clients.

The importance of taking a more holistic approach to a person’s health and wellbeing to help them become a better, healthier athlete.

After a year of taking Ferrous Sulphate supplements, it was only when she discovered her B12 levels were very low, and received the correct medication, that she began to feel better.

This is another issue that highlights one of the many benefits of one of Blizard Physiotherapy’s flagship services - lactate threshold testing.

She explained: “Having the services that we now do at the clinic with the lactate testing, these problems would have been picked up on and addressed instantly.

The testing not only helps with PBs, it also determines whether you’re healthy to train too, and monitors deteriorating trends in health.” 

After over a year of feeling low in training and in life in general, Jenny visited Andy Jones in
Exeter for a physiological test, which highlighted she was more suited to longer distances.

As a result, she ran her first half marathon in Liverpool in 2008, recording an impressive debut 75:53, which remains her PB. She once again credits Dave’s advice as being instrumental in making the race go ‘perfectly.

The next obvious step was the marathon, a distance which takes most runners eight to ten attempts to conquer, and sometimes many never do.

It is testament to Dave’s coaching credentials that each of Jenny’s four marathons to date have seen her notching up a new PB each time, all within 18 months of each other. Adding weight to Dave’s success rate with his athletes, Jenny was able to overcome her hatred of long runs by adopting his more positive approach to endurance training.
Jenny explained: “I hated long runs. Previously, 75 minutes was a very long run for me. In 2006, Dave used to shout at me because after 60 minutes I would speed up just to get home as I had had enough.

“Once you open your mind to new goals, it is amazing how your capabilities change.”

Jenny was able to build up her weekly mileage steadily from 75 miles for her first marathon in London in 2010, to 105 miles in the lead up to her last 26.2m race to date in Denmark the following year, where she ran her current PB of 2:45:10 while representing England.

However, running four marathons in 18 months started to take it’s toll, and Jenny began to experience foot pain midway through 2011 which was to plague her on and off for years afterwards.

Although she was able to use her physiotherapy knowledge to continually assess the level of pain and self-diagnose the injury as not being severe enough to curtail her training, incredibly managing to run her final marathon symptom-free, she acknowledges now that she had ignored signs that her body was not at it’s optimum, and that once again, she had attributed any negative aspects of her training to not being mentally tough enough.

A post-marathon MRI scan confirmed the foot pain to be a stress reaction and an avascular necrosis of the talus, meaning it had not been getting the blood supply.

A year later, while they were in the process of opening the clinic, Jenny’s achilles began to become tight and sore, but again, Dave and Jenny worked together to identify what factors were contributing to the injury and what would be best for her as an individual to help it heal as efficiently as possible.

They discovered that her achilles responded better to very easy, daily jogs in or just below her recovery heart rate zone than complete rest, and as she gradually managed to increase her pace within the zone from 8.30-6.50min/mile, the pain and tightness reduced, along with regular massages on her adductor muscle, which she identified as a problem area.


Within weeks the achilles was able to tolerate faster and longer runs, such as 45 minutes with 10 minutes in her threshold zone at the end of relevant sessions, and, within a couple of months, she was able to start back with tempo and interval sessions, with only a few minor setbacks. 

In addition to using their combined knowledge and experience to treat her two injuries over the years, it was a shared growing understanding of the importance of good nutrition that began back in 2010 that has helped her to improve her training and racing further.

Despite increasing her mileage from 75-95 miles a week between London in 2010 and Brighton in 2011, she noticed that, as a direct result of improving the quality and type of food she was consuming, she no longer had to use ice baths or compressions socks and tights.

As a result, Jenny and Dave began to adopt a lower carbohydrate intake alongside other nutritional changes: “We both significantly reduced our carbohydrates and gluten, as they have been found to increase the inflammation in the body, which I feel has helped me recover from injuries quicker. I also no longer take iron supplements, and yet my iron and haemocrit levels are the highest they have ever been.”

Again, the lessons they have learnt in this area are regularly applied in the clinic when advising clients about how they can further improve their performance, helping to educate athletes in the importance of taking every step possible to maximise their training potential.

Over the last nine years, Dave and Jenny have worked together to build on their vast amounts of experience and qualifications to work out what works best for Jenny as an individual, but also what works best for each and every client who comes to the clinic for physiotherapy, lactate threshold testing and/or coaching.

As a result, Jenny explains the ethos of Dave’s approach to his work:

“The aim of the lactate testing, and the personal coaching, is to offer people of ALL abilities the chance to run to their potential, using the blood testing and heart rate zone training, to maximise their sessions which are integrated into their own unique lifestyle.

“We want to offer elite level training systems to the club runner who can dramatically improve their targets for the cost of a pair of trainers.

“The benefits derived from Dave’s experience cannot be underestimated. He has trained and raced at a high level, performed over a 1000 lactate threshold tests, and coached a good number of athletes. That takes time and practice.”

Dave is also keen to emphasise the fact that training programs should be flexible, taking into account what else is going on in people’s lives when setting sessions, and allowing for the fact that some days, stresses and strains can sometimes take their toll, meaning the effort levels of a run have to be cut back.

Again, this lesson was learnt from experience through coaching Jenny, when, further back in her career, she chose to ignore his advice to pare down a track session because she was very tired, and, as a result, she ran badly and wasn’t able to prepare for a key race in time.

Dave is the perfect example of a coach who is always learning and adapting his approach based on those experiences.

This is a key component of Blizard Physiotherapy’s ethos. Jenny, Dave and the rest of the team are all constantly open to learning from the client how best to improve their service, in order to help people maximise their potential in pursuit of individual excellence.

Jenny explained further: “The client comes to the clinic, we treat them, they compete, we receive feedback, and we make some alterations as a result, thus improving their treatment, improving their performance levels, and improving our services.”

One example of how Jenny has developed new services on the back of learning from her clients is her regular functional movement classes for athletes, after she discovered that many people who were coming to see her needed to focus on the less obvious elements of maintaining a strong body, such as flexibility, breathing, functional strength and drills.

These have proved very successful, and she has now rolled out parts of the classes into one-to-one sessions, recorded instruction videos for Youtube, and sends emails to people who have had lactate tests, as well as organising regular free injury prevention sessions at the clinic and at clubs and groups in the area.

She added: “If we find something that repeatedly works, we share it.”

That is the joy of this partnership. Anyone making the trip to Blizard Physiotherapy is not only going to benefit from their years of shared experience and knowledge, but will also be contributing to the clinic’s future success, as Jenny and Dave continue to learn from athletes’ individual injuries, training, and so much more.

Jenny herself is not ready to hang up her racing shoes just yet, and is still following Dave’s wise words of wisdom when she sets out on her training runs. These currently include a daily 5.50am easy walk or jog to gradually condition her body back to double sessions, a number of recovery zone runs, group interval zone sessions, tempo zone runs, and regular long runs in zone one of her heart rate.

The high-achieving Rotherham Harrier is aiming to spend this year building a strong, injury-free base, moving on from base training in zone two to adding in sections of zone three and four in time, and with the added goal of putting her lactate threshold test results into practice as she continues her recovery from injury.

She explained the benefits of having regular lactate threshold tests from a personal point of view:

“My regular lactate testing results show that my marathon potential is already faster than it was before, and that I can maintain a decent lactate reading for 10k similar to my previous PB of 34:08.

“I now just have to train consistently, alongside regular testing to tweak the training schedule. This is the beauty of the testing - it shows what you are truly capable of, provided you are prepared to do the training. 

“Dave helped me to transform my training and racing, and my whole approach to how I deal with preparing for competitions. I was contemplating quitting competing altogether in 2006, before going on to record the best race times of my life after working with Dave. Now my lactate threshold tests suggest I can go onto race even faster at certain distances is testament to how successful his coaching methods are.”