Soreness help... Read please?

You are over training and need to stop running before you continue to harm yourself and your body.

Consistant soreness and pain is NOT normal. Your body is screaming at you to stop and you aren't listening to it. Any pain that is above a 2 on a scale of 1-10 means that you need to take a rest day or an easy day.

As you get more experienced as a runner it will become easier to listen to your body and understand what it's telling you. Persistant pain and soreness means stop running because your current training program is too much for your body to handle at that moment. You need more training before you get up to that level.

You are pushing your muscles so hard you are actually damaging them, this is why you are noticing a decrease in your physical ability. Rest days are 100% necessary and you need to obey milage rules. You shouldn't increase your weekly milage by more than 10% per week. So if you run a 10 mile week, next week should be no more than 11 miles total. You can jump from 10 mile weeks to 20 mile weeks.

Overtraining sneaks up on you too, the pain can be ignorable but if you keep pushing you end up hitting a wall like you describe.

You should stop running and do other moderate cardio in the meantime until you are no longer in pain. Then I recommend going and getting some good books on running (one on running for beginners and one on injury prevention). You need to educate yourself more on over training and how to avoid it. It will help you train smarter in the future.

-Connor

Do you take a rest day? There are foam rollers and stretches you can do, too. You might benefit from yoga or some other relaxing stretch class. Cross-training might give the muscles you usually use a rest - try to find a stationary bike or try swimming.