A Passion for Running

Dear Mark,

I know you’ve worked hard to fix your form. I’m proud of you for learning the pose method and am impressed you took up barefoot running to strengthen your feet. I wish all my children would spend time in their bare feet – I created the earth hoping all of you would spend at least some time connecting with it.

Anyway, I gave you some shin splints to tell you something. Unfortunately, you didn’t listen so I’ve made them worse. Mark, I want you to think about why you got shin splints. Really think about it and once you are sure you have the answer, tell people because there are others who suffer as you have. Think you can do that?
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Dear God,

I wondered about that and was frankly a bit peeved at you for your latest “gift”. After I noticed the shin splints, I thought it was just because of increase of mileage I’d started into but, in the back of my head, I was thinking that wasn’t right because the pose method says if I’m running right, I won’t get shin splints.

The splints got worse and my ankle even started hurting. I felt like I was back where I was a year ago.

I concentrated on the problem. Why why why? I paid attention to how I was landing and discovered I wasn’t landing on the ball of my right foot – I was landing on the outside part of my forefoot. So I read up on pronation and supination and saw pictures like this one (normal on the left, pronation on the right):

I studied how I was standing and walking and began to think I have a pretty severe biomechanical problem(s) with my right foot. I had the doctor I sit next to at work take a look. He agreed. We talked about what I should do. I was happy to learn he doesn’t think orthodics are the answer. He thinks I need to strengthen my foot some more and that strength training exercises are the key. He suggested I see a sports physiology expert. He also mentioned the problems may not solely be centered in my feet and that their cause may be as far away as my hips. That got me thinking about Aaron. He’s been seeing this expert who, among other things, identified problems in Aaron’s hips. He gave Aaron a whack of exercises to correct a number of imbalances. Now I’m thinking I have very similar issues.

So, I’m gonna follow-up with this stuff. I’m going to work at landing on the balls of my feet but, more importantly, I’m going to figure out what I need to do to fix the physical imbalances I have on my right side.

And I’m going to tell everyone who will listen that if they have problems such as shin-splints, they need to think really hard about the underlying causes.

Is that a good start Big Guy?