Take Nothing For Granted

Take Nothing For Granted

Skipping Is Good  - In Moderation!

 

Yesterday I did some Pose drills and some skipping for a while then went for a run of about four miles. Here are the stats for the geeks amongst us…

I ran 3.93 miles in 00:31:47 @08:05 pace and 73%WHR.

I decided that I was going to run this with as much relaxation as I could and keep the pace down to an easy effort, concentrating on just getting the form right, landing under the hips, with a very quick, light pull of the ankle up towards the bottom and for the most part I thought I did quite well. I enjoyed the run although for some reason my calves and feet started aching and feeling quite tight in the last half mile or so.

When I stopped running I was in considerable pain and couldn’t understand what on earth was wrong! Walking was quite difficult yet when I ran, the pain almost vanished and it was obvious to me the running was the cause of this yet my common sense told me it had to be. I was confused and quite downhearted. I just felt like somehow I didn’t know how to run any more without hurting myself.

This morning my wife and I were talking about it – I was and still am finding walking quite difficult yet can run with no problems. suddenly Heidi said that there was no way I would get Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness in my legs after only four miles – I don’t get this after 20 miles usually since I have been training for distances beyond marathon. This made sense and then we started thinking about anything new I could have done, any new movements my body isn’t used to doing. I puzzled and kept saying that my running style wasn’t any different to what it has been for many weeks now apart from I don’t bounce as much and I’m less tense. Then we both realised, I have been skipping! I blogged about how much I was enjoying it the other day! I had forgotten one or two important points.

1. I have just started skipping with renewed vigour to make it part of my warm up routine
2. I have just started being able to skip while running on the spot
3. I have skipped more in the last few days than I have ever done

Basically I have done too much too soon on the skipping and that has fatigued my muscles! When learning a new skill it feels very hard and you try, try and try again until you ‘get it’. I did this with the skipping using running action. I think the point at which yo get it is when you start to log it into the subconscious and then you can relax because the action becomes more natural, you don’t have to think about it. Then of course you take it for granted and don’t realise what a hard workout you actually put your body through!

I tend to be quite a goal oriented individual and anything I set my mind to I do it with great gusto. I am obsessive and will continue until I have finished or achieved the goal – with the skipping I wasn’t going to be happy until I could run on the spot while skipping; something I have never been able to do yet always wanted to (Heidi is brilliant at it by the way). This is a really good mindset to have when racing a marathon because you become blind to everything else but the race. However, sometimes it gets in the way because you are looking so closely at the elephant you can see nothing else going on around you.

I can still run reasonably well because I must use slightly different muscles to skip – especially when still tense while learning a new technique.

Note to self:

Any new exercise must be taken as part of your overall training and should not be taken for granted! New exercises such as skipping should be done little and often until the body and mind gets used to it.

Lean Times

An interesting question on the Fetch forum this morning… “Ian, does that mean, assuming that one runs efficiently, that the degree of lean alone determines pace?”

My understanding is that we use gravity by positioning our body weight and upsetting our Centre of Gravity in the direction we wish to travel. We lean towards the place we want to run and increasing that lean makes up get there faster. It takes quite some understanding when your common sense tells you that you move with the muscles in your legs. It isn’t immediately apparent that you only move to position the body and give gravity a helping hand, then you catch yourself from falling just at the right moment. This happens many thousands of times with millisecond precision during a run. This article is an interesting read and puts it so much better than I.

http://www.posetech.com/training/archives/000146.html

It is a leap of faith and until you actually really believe this then you will always do what you learned to do by observation and that means you will forever fight gravity rather than use it. I have had many struggles with this – I believe it completely though now. Pushing with the calf and thing muscles only serve to push you into the air because you do it at the wrong time  - too late and your body isn’t positioned to be able to drive forwards. This is my understanding of it I hasten to add and I could well be wrong. Please correct me if you are a Pose Coach and/or have a deeper understanding of this. It is very difficult to explain though. What we see as running and model in our heads isn’t what is actually happening. Strange yet true. The great gap between perception and reality serves to confound many a newcomer to efficient running. As Dr. Romanov said somewhere – in the Pose Triathlon  Book – until we can correct our perception of what we are doing then we cannot correct any defective action. We cannot correct what we do not know about basically.