Running Chick

Ever wonder what my treadmill stride sessions consist of? Well now you can! The stride-free music starts and then the stride clip starts.

This week was 3ish treadmill miles on Tuesday and Thursday and then 3.5 today outside along the waterfront and in downtown Houghton. It can get pretty mundane on the treadmill and I’ve decided to keep my max at 3.5 miles just for sanity purposes.  It was really nice to get outside and run some hills.  Things have been going well, overall. My shin pain comes and goes, but I usually only notice it when I drop my pace below 10:00. I sent an update email to my PT lady and asked her if I should be picking up my stride rate if I run faster, and she told me that I should not be going any faster than 10:00 for the time being or I might have a flare-up.  Oopsie.

Other than that, the big news in my world is that I’ve decided to sell my house and buy something bigger outside of the city limits.  Josh and I have been looking at various places over the past two weeks, but nothing really tempting has come along yet. We looked at about 10 houses today, some were icky, some were really icky, and some were nice enough to schedule a visit with the relator.  It’s a good thing I’m not doing any serious training this summer, because between house hunting and doing the final fix up stuff on my house before it hits the market, I’m not going to have much free time.

We saw this little cutie when we were out house hunting this morning.

His mom jumped into the weeds while he was looking at us and when he turned and found her not there, he freaked out.

He ran around by the side of the road for a bit, until he hopped into the bushes just a little bit down from where his mom jumped in. He was so tiny! I totally wanted to take him home as a pet. I bet he’d make a great running partner!

Alternate titles I came up with for this post:

• It’s Not the Shoes
• Metronomes are for Running?
• Hi, I’m Nancy and I’m an Overstrider

In other words, it’s the results of my UW Health Runner’s Clinic evaluation. The nitty gritty details can be found in the detailed (and pretty awesome) notes that Josh took while I was being bent, twisted, flexed and put through my paces on the most bizarre and potentially unsafe treadmill I’ve ever seen.

Long story short, there is nothing wrong with my foot strike. I am not a over-pronator as I’ve been told by the majority of the running store people and the podiatrist. Nor am I a supinator, as the last running store person told me. I’m completely normal. All the different shoes I’ve purchased over the years to correct this or that have actually done absolutely, positively nothing. I don’t even want to think about how much money I’ve spent trying to fix a problem that didn’t exist.

What I do have is a problem with overstriding and heel striking. Badly. I knew I was always a bit of a heel striker, the soles of my shoes easily proved that, but until I saw myself on the video, I never really knew how much. I should have asked for a copy of the video taken from the side because I could have posted that instead of wasting the last 20 minutes of my day scouring the intertubes for an appropriate image to demonstrate. This was the best I could come up with..

…heel strike, knee locked. So, basically, what’s happening is my heel is acting like a brake and all the impact force is traveling up my leg and manifesting itself in the smaller, weaker muscles. My quads, hamstrings and hips passed all the strength tests with flying colors and they’re absorbing some of the impact, but it’s those lower leg muscles that are sucking the majority of the impact. That’s an overly simplified explanation certainly, but the official analysis was pretty scientific.  The PT drew force vector diagrams, talked about Newton’s Third Law and other physics-related stuff which caused Josh’s eyes to turn to hearts and mine to glaze over.

The good news is that if I change to more of a mid-foot strike, I should be able to get rid of my chronic shin pain. The bad news is that changing my stride is going to be hard, it’s going to take months and I have to start out on the treadmill so I can set a constant speed and focus on the strides. Currently, I’m running at a stride rate of 164 (foot to ground contacts per minute) and I have to bring it up to 174. I get to run three times per week – two runs must be on the treadmill at 174 and the last run I can do outside at any pace just to keep me sane. I’ll start out doing intervals for 3 minutes of strides and 2 minutes stride-free for a couple of weeks, then move to 4:1, then 5:1, etc.  Josh used his geek skillz to make me a 45 minute long mp3 that has the proper intervals, so while everybody else is jamming out to Lady Gaga, Pink and whoever else the kids listen to nowadays, I’ll be listening 3 minutes of “tick-tick-tick-tick-tick” at a tempo of 174 and then 2 minute snippets of songs from the latest Lady Gaga album.

Tomorrow, I’m signing up for a gym membership and it’ll also be my first stride session.  My only hope is that for the next month, it either rains or is super hot & humid on my running days so I’m not so miserable slogging away on the treadmill. Think that’ll happen? Doubtful!

I successfully completed three pain-free, conservative (read slow) miles on the dreadmill today. Holla!

I was a little afraid of reinjuring my calf, so I took it really easy and wore the calf sleeve I picked up last summer. It's supposed to do things such as keep the muscle warm and provide compression and support which are all good for a calf injury. At least that's what the doctor told me when he advised me to get one. Seeing as how my calf stayed attached throughout my run, I can only assume it did it's job.

Anyhoo, tomorrow I'll attempt four miles. I don't know if I'll do it on the dreadmill or not, I'll let the weather determine that. Speaking of weather, Ma Winter can't decide whether she wants to give up or not. We had snow yesterday and today and it's also on the forecast for tomorrow. The temps have been in the mid-to-high 30's so what snow we've been getting hasn't been sticking around, but it leaves us in a constant of wet and sloppy roads. That's no fun for running. If I do run outside tomorrow, I'll have to pick a hill-less route that's calf-friendly. That'll take me at least half the day messing around on www.mapmyrun.com.

Oh, new gear! The Superfeet insoles that I got a couple of weeks ago weren’t so super on my feet so back to www.runningwarehouse.com they went. The UPS guy dropped these babies off today:

New Balance Pressure Relief Insoles

I’ve used them before with no issues, and bonus - they don’t need trimming.  I’ll be taking them for their first spin tomorrow.

Shameless plug:  www.runningwarehouse.com 

I’m completely in love with this store.  Their prices are great, they have **free 2-day shipping** and they’ll even return, for a full refund, trimmed, worn insoles.  I’ve spent so much money there in the last two weeks that I’ve put myself on time-out from their web site.  Hopefully there are just as many other runners out there as addicted to it as I am and their business won’t go under because of my hiatus.

Let’s hope, anyway.