Dagnabbit, I am OLD...

Today is my birthday.  I am grateful for all these years piling up on me.  Maybe we can all be grateful together, just for today, for what our bodies can do:

Thanks, feet, for carrying me around, even though I have abused you with uncomfortable shoes from time to time.

Thanks, knees, for holding the fort when other joints have failed.

Thanks, hips, for containing those babies who have suddenly turned into adults.

Thanks, spine, for holding me up, down, and sideways as needed.

Thanks, arms, for carrying all that stuff.

Thanks, skull, for keeping my brain safe despite my best efforts.

And thanks, heart, for keeping the beat and for filling with love (anatomically and metaphorically, respectively).

Just a little bit more... in focus...

Focus is important for a lot of reasons, but there is one in particular that I have on my mind: the MYOB principle.  Minding our own business is, in many ways, countercultural.  We live in a competitive soup that will boil us alive if we let it.  School, sport, work… all of them tend to focus on rankings and wins.

But when the time comes to work out, we need to let that go, especially in a class environment.  We have to tune in to our own bodies and see only our own performance or we risk injury.  That guy in the front row might be freakishly flexible and trying to emulate him will do nothing more than win us a trip to the couch with ice.  That woman with the enormous weights?  She’s been working up to that for years and we need to remember that we’ve only come to class twice so far.

We need to do our workout, paying attention to what we are doing, how it feels, and how to make it better.

Run, Run Away

Over the weekend, I went to a workshop about running.  It was two hours of great information and hard work!  I liked it so much that I’m doing a three-day version in May!

I have never been much of a runner.  I got in trouble in high school P.E. and had to work off the demerits or whatever they were called by running.  I hated every minute of it, but I got better at it.  It was the memory of getting better at it that led me to try it when my forearms and hips objected to biking.  Cue the ruptured plantar fascia.  This did not improve my feelings about running.  However, with the rupture healed, with clients running more, and with the purpose of the workshop stated as running without pain, I figured I could try again.

There were three things I took away from the workshop that I want to share.  One was that we need to strengthen and mobilize our feet.  The activation and stretching exercises we did percolated up my legs and freed up my ankles and knees as well.  The exercises were surprisingly challenging and I felt them the next day in that post-workout soreness way.

The second was that we need to squat more.  I don’t mean that we need to do more squats, although that is also a wonderful thing.  I mean that we need to make an effort to hang out in the deep squat position, heels on the floor if possible.  For me, this will take some getting used to and I suspect that I am not alone (I will have to find an activity to link with it—maybe while my breakfast eggs boil?).  We can thank our chairs and our too-sedentary lives for this particular difficulty.

Finally, and this is what truly won me over, running should be fun.  When our bodies are adequately prepared for running, it can be play, like when we were kids at recess.