A Passion for Running

Welcome to the home of Mark aka The Running Blogfather – a 40 year-old dad, husband and marathon runner who's beaten injury and is on the comeback trail!

the value of a partner

passion for running category: form,pose running method,running on Monday, October 24 2005

So, after about a week off, I got back to running. Aaron and I went out for a 20 minute test run – just to see how things would feel. It went well but my leg, foot and ankle still have some…discomfort.

The really valuable thing about today’s run came from having Aaron along for the ride. After I concentrated for a few minutes on correct foot placement, Aaron asked me to follow him to see if I could spot his “knee coming in” – a troublesome thing for him. While I could not see his knee doing funny stuff, I was able to clearly see the toes on his right foot turning outward as they left the ground. His left side was fine. This left Aaron wondering if this might be the reason/part of the reason for his knee hurting/having some discomfort so he worked on it for the rest of the run.

Then Aaron returned the favor and ran behind me. The first thing he mentioned was that my right heel wasn’t coming anywhere close to touching the ground. Hmmm…I concentrated on letting that heel come closer to the ground. It didn’t want to. It was work. It became obvious to me that’s part of my problem. If my heel/ankle is not sufficiently relaxed, it’s going to cause tension in my calves and achilles tendon and that’s going to cause all kinds of other problems. I wonder why my right leg is doing that? Perhaps it is shorter than the left one? Maybe, as I discussed in a previous post, I have a problem with hip alignment? I have to figure that out. Are there any experts out there that would like to chime in?

At any rate, I learned a lot today. And I’ve (still) got much to work on form-wise.

But I’m patient. I’m in this for the long haul.




6 Comments

6982

Comment by susan

Tuesday October 25, 2005 @

You keep working at it Mark, and maybe I’ll learn from your trial and error!

6983

Comment by Jon in Michigan

Tuesday October 25, 2005 @

Well, obviously nothing I’ve done has fixed shin splints or twisting feet or other wierd stuff. Althoughm my achilles and shins are great since the race. Maybe that’s what you need. A good race to knock everything back in place.

6984

Comment by Chris Brogan...

Tuesday October 25, 2005 @

It’s really cool that Aaron could do that for you. I think it’d be great to have a partner like that. I never did manage to hook up with a steady running partner. I had a few friends I liked running with, but they were ultra-runners, and as such, it wasn’t ever easy to schedule as much time for mileage as they’d like. Anyhow…

I’m sorry for your troubles, but it seems like this is something actionable. Good luck.

6989

Comment by deene

Tuesday October 25, 2005 @

although I prefer being a loner I’ve found it’s quite helpful to run with others. Interest about the differents in foot placement when you run – maybe you have some hip alignment problem or one leg a bit longer than the other?

6990

Comment by Debra

Tuesday October 25, 2005 @

You can often spot leg length discrepency by looking in a mirror and checking whether your pelvis is level. The tell-tale sign is that the curve of the waist is different on both sides. That’s what my podiatrist says.

Mind you, according to my chiropractor (as far as I can remember) leg length discrepency can be caused by a tilted pelvis.

6991

Comment by Dawn (aka Pink Lady)

Tuesday October 25, 2005 @

That’s cool that the two of you can do that for each other. I’m not sure I would know how to pick out flaws unless they were really obvious.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
A blue box by your comment means you do not have an avatar from www.gravatar.com!

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.