Dr. Rachel Selina // #FitnessAthleteFriday // www.ptonice.com  In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Endurance Athlete faculty member Rachel introduces the concept of an off-season for runners in order to focus on physical recovery, mental recovery, strengthening, and rehab. Rachel lays out a structured off-season approach for clinicians to use when working with runners. Take a listen to the episode or read the episode transcription below. If you're looking to learn from our Endurance Athlete division, check out our live physical therapy courses or our online physical therapy courses. Check out our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab. EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION INTRODUCTION Hey everyone, this is Alan. Chief Operating Officer here at ICE. Before we get started with today’s episode, I want to talk to you about VersaLifts. Today’s episode is brought to you by VersaLifts. Best known for their heel lift shoe inserts, VersaLifts has been a leading innovator in bringing simple but highly effective rehab tools to the market. If you have clients with stiff ankles, Achilles tendinopathy, or basic skeletal structure limitations keeping them from squatting with proper form and good depth, a little heel lift can make a huge difference. VersaLifts heel lifts are available in three different sizes and all of them add an additional half inch of h drop to any training shoe, helping athletes squat deeper with better form. Visit www.vlifts.com/icephysio or click the link in today’s show notes to get your VersaLifts today. RACHEL SELINA Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the PT on Ice Daily Show. Okay, I'm happy to be here as your host today. My name is Rachel Selina, and I'm a TA within our Endurance Athlete Division. So I TA for our Rehabilitation of the Injured Runner, both our live and our online courses. Our online course starts again on January 2nd, so if you're hoping to get into the next cohort of that, registration is open now, you can jump in online. It'd be a great way to kick off your new year Um, so we'd love to have you there again, January 2nd is when we start that next cohort. Um, so today, today we are going to dive into some running related topics. THE RUNNING OFF-SEASON I want to talk about the running off season and kind of what it is, how it could be structured and really at the end of everything, like why we should take one or why we should encourage our runners to be doing an actual off season and what that could look like. Why do we need this? It's a big missed opportunity. I don't think many of our runners are taking an actual off-season, even though in almost any other sport, we see an off-season that has a particular structure that looks different than our typical in-season, pre-season kind of training. But we don't often see that in running. And here I'm mainly talking about our recreational runners. So not our elite, elite, highly competitive, like they're getting paid to run. Um, but our everyday person that has goals has things they're trying to achieve with their running. Um, but again, not quite that high end elite athlete. Um, and it's really not what I see people doing. Okay. So what I often see. And I live in Michigan, so this is a bit skewed for kind of our timeline, but the same kind of like concept applies. I live in Michigan, so most people end up having like a fall goal race. And that might be a like a marathon or a half marathon. But they train a lot over the summer, building up to that race. It happened in the fall. And maybe they're using that race as a like a they're going for a goal. They're going for a PR or they're using a lot of people are trying to qualify for Boston. OK, so either way, that that fall event is something that someone is reall