three things thursday
1. I have terrible metro karma. Something annoying and delaying happened on every train I got on yesterday. I had to metro up to the Zoo from work for my PT appointment, and we got as far as Dupont when they made everyone unload and said they didn't know when the next train would be headed north. And my appointment was in 11 minutes. So what's a girl to do? Why, haul serious ass 1.8 miles in dress clothes, laptop in backpack and not a single hair tie to be found. Thank goodness I had a (very old & worn out) pair of running shoes with me.
Oh, and Connecticut Ave has only a tiny hill. But fortunately it was only 81º out, not 104º like last Wednesday. So after my PT appointment, I needed this to continue cooling down after my less-than-2-mile-run.
There's raspberry yogurt under there somewhere. And I usually only get one gummy worm, but I went crazy and doubled up. Hold me back, I'm losing control.
2. Speaking of PT, I'm actually surprised that it (plus taking it easy on the running) seems to be going well. My psoas has loosened up noticeably, although the immediate result of this after Monday's session was that my SI joint fell out of alignment FIVE times in 48 hours. Turns out my tight psoas was holding it in place and now that it's relaxed, isn't doing it anymore. I wonder what is actually supposed to be holding my SI joint in place? Maybe I was just born without one of those? But now that I know how to do squats correctly, I can actually feel my glutes every once in a while and the other night they were even tired! Ridiculous. Next week we're going to start working on drills to address my magical collapsing trick hip and Frankenstein foot stomp. Color me excited.
3. On the subject of gait...last night the poet and I took a wander over to the sporting goods store, and while we were there, I decided to try on some of these happy pillow minimalist (even typing the word makes me cringe) shoes that many of you are preaching about. I pulled a pair of Nike Frees and Sacucony Kinvaras off the shelf JUST TO TRY. Calm down for a second, I'm not switching shoes, I'm just experimenting.
It was, however, an incredibly revealing experience. In the Nike Frees, I actually could not run with my normal gait, because the three steps I took with my fabulous heel strike sent massive shockwaves of pain up my leg and into my hips. My body kind of naturally started doing something else that I can't even really describe, but it felt a lot lighter and smoother that what I usually do, which until the moment I put these unicorn shoes on, I would have described as not NOT light and smooth (didja follow that? Sorry, grammar police). The Kinvaras were different as well - they still kind of forced me not to heel-strike, but it felt like more of a natural compromise between my regular disaster of a gait and the Frees. In the Frees, I felt almost like I had to run on my forefoot, in the Kinvaras I felt like I had to think about it less. The poet actually videoed me taking a test jog in each shoe (and then in my own shoes, boy, did that look like hell) and to my extremely uneducated eye, it looks pretty different. Here's the Kinvaras.
So, just a whole lot of food for thought. When we got home, the poet asked me if I liked either shoe, and my honest answer was, I don't know. I'm not sure how I feel about a shoe that changes my gait the way it did. I mean, my gait is a mess but I'm trying to address that through PT, not with some kind of band-aid in the form of a hot pink fairy dust shoe (although BOY OH BOY do I want a pair of those hot pink shoes). But if the strengthening I'm doing in PT combined with a slightly different shoe (not barefoot or VFF, just a different shoe) can make me a cleaner, healthier runner, then why wouldn't I do it? I am SO against the minimalist shoe as a concept, but I'm trying to keep an open mind right now about my body and my running, especially while I'm working really hard in PT to get this injury straightened out. And to his credit, the poet isn't prancing around in his VFFs/Kinvaras saying, "I TOLD YOU SO."
Happy Thursday, everyone!
2. Speaking of PT, I'm actually surprised that it (plus taking it easy on the running) seems to be going well. My psoas has loosened up noticeably, although the immediate result of this after Monday's session was that my SI joint fell out of alignment FIVE times in 48 hours. Turns out my tight psoas was holding it in place and now that it's relaxed, isn't doing it anymore. I wonder what is actually supposed to be holding my SI joint in place? Maybe I was just born without one of those? But now that I know how to do squats correctly, I can actually feel my glutes every once in a while and the other night they were even tired! Ridiculous. Next week we're going to start working on drills to address my magical collapsing trick hip and Frankenstein foot stomp. Color me excited.
It was, however, an incredibly revealing experience. In the Nike Frees, I actually could not run with my normal gait, because the three steps I took with my fabulous heel strike sent massive shockwaves of pain up my leg and into my hips. My body kind of naturally started doing something else that I can't even really describe, but it felt a lot lighter and smoother that what I usually do, which until the moment I put these unicorn shoes on, I would have described as not NOT light and smooth (didja follow that? Sorry, grammar police). The Kinvaras were different as well - they still kind of forced me not to heel-strike, but it felt like more of a natural compromise between my regular disaster of a gait and the Frees. In the Frees, I felt almost like I had to run on my forefoot, in the Kinvaras I felt like I had to think about it less. The poet actually videoed me taking a test jog in each shoe (and then in my own shoes, boy, did that look like hell) and to my extremely uneducated eye, it looks pretty different. Here's the Kinvaras.
So, just a whole lot of food for thought. When we got home, the poet asked me if I liked either shoe, and my honest answer was, I don't know. I'm not sure how I feel about a shoe that changes my gait the way it did. I mean, my gait is a mess but I'm trying to address that through PT, not with some kind of band-aid in the form of a hot pink fairy dust shoe (although BOY OH BOY do I want a pair of those hot pink shoes). But if the strengthening I'm doing in PT combined with a slightly different shoe (not barefoot or VFF, just a different shoe) can make me a cleaner, healthier runner, then why wouldn't I do it? I am SO against the minimalist shoe as a concept, but I'm trying to keep an open mind right now about my body and my running, especially while I'm working really hard in PT to get this injury straightened out. And to his credit, the poet isn't prancing around in his VFFs/Kinvaras saying, "I TOLD YOU SO."
