For the last few falls, like some strange and twisted biological cycle, I will pull a muscle. Or a tendon. Or strain a ligament. I'm an equal-opportunity connective-tissue abuser. Some runners view sidelining injuries as opportunities for personal growth and self-discovery. Being less scholarly, I spend what would have been running time coming up with jingles and other poetic forms to describe my maladies. There's apparently an inverse relationship between consecutive non-running days and my ingenuity. It was a solid month before this limerick finally kicked in:

There was a runner from the Midwest, Who always tried to do his best. He would train all year round, Except when a pulled muscle did abound, And then he'd give his gluteus maximus a rest.

I'll always remember January 1998 for this lovely ditty: "It's not something over which to scream and fuss, but running on an indoor track led me to pull my latissimus dorsus." Hey, some injured runners may wish to spend their extra time learning how to wire their bathrooms with surround-sound speakers or cook gourmet, vegetarian, low-cholesterol wheat-free Armenian appetizers. I've got poetry priorities instead.

I admit I'd healed before I could come up with a haiku about my vastus lateralis. But I'll always remember Feb. 4-17, 1999, for a sweet, sentimental poem regarding my gastrocnemius. I'm already ahead of this poetic-injury game, as I've nearly completed a quatrain about my Achilles tendon and it hasn't even been injured yet.

Most runners have a two-pronged approach to a possible injury. The first is, if I ignore it long enough it will go away: otherwise known as the infamous "I can run through it" theory and formally recognized as the Mindset of the Myopic Runner.

This unreasonable approach is usually followed by a few-weeks layoff and newly-found creed of being much smarter next time. This attitude will, inevitably, last until -- drum roll, please -- the next time. Live and learn? More like run and disregard. This repeating pattern is a malady for which there is no known cure, and research has established there's a direct correlation between one's best 10K time and the degree of myopia.

After the injury comes the comeback. For one who has the patience of a hyperactive puppy, comebacks are the most difficult part of running for me. I want results and I want them yesterday.

Experience has allowed me to calculate my own formula for returning from an injury and determining how much and how often I should be running. Some may adhere to the 10-percent rule, i.e. don't increase weekly mileage beyond that or risk re-injury. The problem I discovered with this formula was, since my initial post-injury runs could be measured in yards and my pace timed with a sundial, applying the 10-percent rule meant I'd not be in marathon shape until the year 2078. I'm not that patient.

I recommend you take the average mileage for the five weeks before your injury, divide it by five or the number of pounds you've gained while laid off (whichever is greater), multiply that by the number of running magazines you subscribe to, add the number of running shoes you now rotate, subtract half the number of races you ran in the last 10 months (excluding December through March), and add five if you can correctly spell Khalid Khannouchi and Naoko Takahashi on your first attempt. This is the number of miles you should run in your first week back from injury.

After that, increase miles per week by the number of old race numbers of the last two years that reside in your home. Add seven if any of those were PRs and three if you own racing flats.

I'm optimistic that my yearly string of pulled muscles will eventually come to an end. Perhaps that will occur when I finally employ things I've read about to avoid injury. Maybe the last limerick could be:

There was a runner who thought he'd found the key, From annual layoff where his body would atrophy. It seemed he'd pull a muscle each year, Which made him sit on his rear, But now with longer warm-ups he's in the clear. Excerpted by permission from I Run, Therefore I Am -- Nuts! by Bob Schwartz. Copyright (c) 2001 by Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc. Available at bookstores, Amazon.com, humankinetics.com or 1-800-747-4457. MR