A Passion for Running

Website-wise, this week sucked. Early in the week, I started noticing some problems around the completerunning domain. Weird problems with our blogs and, even weirder, not all of the blogs had the same problem.

To make a long story short, I finally deduced that our domain host changed some security settings without telling me. While I’m a little miffed at the “without telling me” part, it’s hard to be mad at dreamhost because they are always active in the fight against things like denial of service attacks instead of just blaming their customers for problems like my old host iPowerweb did.

So, I spent much of the week fixing stuff. ugg…not the way I like to spend my evenings. Oh well.

Onto to the positive stuff – running! This week has been tremendous. I had a smokin’ 90 minute run on Monday, followed by a terrific 51 minute ass-spankin’ trounce over my four sisters (sisters=hills) route, and a nice 50 minute trail run yesterday that ended with a 7 minute mile. I’m thinking a nice light run is in order for today.

And everything feels good. My ankle feels good. My feet feel good. My calves feel good and there are absolutely no signs of my shin splint nemesis returning.

Transitioning to Pose took a year. A year of no racing. A year that began with running 100 feet at a time. A year of trial and error. A year that included an injury incurred because of a stupid mistake I made, and a year of watching other people progress while I sucked up my pride and learned to run again.

But it’s been so worth it.

Man-oh-man, I’m havin’ such a good time. Today marked my fourth hard run in as many days, and my third week of consistent running since the renovation. The bonus for today is that it was a trail run. Yeah!

And the body feels fantastic – the Pose Method is being good to me. It now feels really natural and I’m noticing my timing on the pull part of pose-fall-pull is getting better and better. What exactly does that mean? It means that the better my timing is on the pull, the less time I spend on the ground and the less impact there is to my body. The outcome of that last sentence is that with all the hard running I’m doing, I’ve had virtually no soreness. And that’s from running on pavement in shoes that offer no more protection than bedroom slippers.

See my sidebar welcome over there at top right? I’m thinking it might be time to change it to reflect the fact that I’m 99% done reengineering my form. I hope it doesn’t anger the running gods to make that declaration, but I feel that I need to move on from learning mode, ramp up my confidence and just run.

A shout out to Jeanne from Not Born to Run. Jeanne’s having some bunion problems. I have two runner friends with major bunions. I’ve never had them. Have you?

Well, the vibram fivefingers shoe continues to create a buzz. Even Dr. Romanov – founder of the Pose Method of Running has endorsed it!

Vibram: Are you listening? I can’t get your shoes in Canada!

I’ve picked on Nike and Oprah Winfrey and Adidas in previous posts so it only seems fair to pick on New Balance today.

I could not imagine a better illustration of how not to run. Unfortunately, in this commercial (view the one titled Abzorb EX/891) New Balance is not trying to do that. Instead, they are trying to tell you about a shoe that will protect you from the pounding often associated with running.

For those of you who are new my world, what’s wrong with this picture is the terrible heel-striking this runner is demonstrating. Ouch.

Do yourself a favour and become a mid/forefoot runner so you can save yourself some pain and the need to buy shoes like the one’s New Balance is peddling in this commercial.

Say it with me folks. Heel striking is B-A-D.