I hadn’t planned on it, but today I went for a 30 minute jaunt in the river valley.
Today’s focus was entirely on form. I wouldn’t allow myself to deviate at all from proper foot contact and from lifting my heel quickly and cleanly from the ground.
Guess what? My leg and ankle feel better tonight than they have for quite some time following a run.
The further along I get on this journey to re-engineer my form, the more I realize form is everything.
I thought the following comment from Debra was so helpful I’d post it. Thanks Debra. I’m going to go see my Chiro/ARTS guy as soon as I can!
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.
Debra left the comment after reading yesterday’s post.
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.
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?
—————-
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?
