I have been thinking about starting to write for a while but there always seems to be other things that come up, you know those unnecessary things like cooking meals, washing clothes, breaking up fights between children, sleeping, etc. The irony is that 90% of the time when I have an idea for something to write it is when I am in the middle of doing the thing I want to write about, in this case running.
I used to run quite a lot. I ran fast, compared to what I do now anyway, but probably not by many runners standards. I ran far, again by my standards. And I ran hard, also by my standards. I ran through pain and injury, just learned to ice and switch shoes and that worked for awhile. I did some physio when the pain got to be too much and then finally started to wear orthotics because that is what my doc and physio told me I should do.
Well over the years the shin splints and planters fasciitis problems turned into sore knees and hips and finally I was told by many people that I am just not a runner and that I needed to give up this idea that I could or would run. Maybe I should just find another sport. So I did. I started swimming again, and did alot of walking. The swimming was great for awhile, but eventually I developed an allergy to the chlorine and while the walking was pleasant it still hurt my feet after longer walks and did not give me the high that comes from running or even swimming hard.
After our sixth child was born, my only c-section out of seven deliveries, my body just shut right down and I was hardly able to go about my daily chores let alone go far a 20 minute walk....and I plunged into depression. Thank God that my family doc caught it as soon as I went to see him and knowing me decided to prescribe a natural protocol to start, which was very helpful and started me back on the road to recovery, a very very long road which in some ways I am still on.
With some diet changes, some good supplements, rest and slowly getting back into exercising, which included almost exclusively for awhile a cellerciser (otherwise known as a mini tramp), I started to regain my strength and was able eventually to progress back to slow short runs, or slogs. Of course just when I was getting back on my feet again, at the ripe old age of 45, God blessed us with another pregnancy...the hardest one of all. But knowing what I did about my adrenals I was a little better prepared for the fatigue and slow recovery this time and tried to be patient and gentle with myself.
It took over a year for me to start back to trying running and again I took it very slow. But this time I could not overcome the planters fasciitis or the progressive knee and hip pain. I was very frustrated and again I was reminded that maybe running just was not the activity for me. I gave in and decided that I was now finally ready to hang up my running shoes for good. And so I have!
The problems with my feet, knees, and hips did not stop with my resolution to stop running. In fact they seemed to be getting worse. Even the tramp did not seem to help. I was now ready to just cut my feet off. I had tried all sorts of othotics. I spent far too much money on orthopedic shoes, I wore Birkenstock from the time I put my feet on the ground, actually in my sandals which lived by my bed at night, to when I kicked them off while in bed at night. Nothing was working. Till I came across a website that changed the way I looked at feet. The web site is
http://sock-doc.com/ and the doc/chiropractor
Steve Gangemi. I will not, on this post get into all the things I learned about my feet and my many mistakes, that will be for another post. Suffice it to say that I ended up unlearning a bunch of bad habits and misconceptions that I had for years.
The result of all this learning and unlearning was the realization it was time to go back to walking like I did when I was a child, barefoot! In fact the more I thought about it, the more I read about it, the more I watched videos of both types of runners and their gaits, the more sense it made. Mostly the more I did it, the more I worked on regaining the muscle that years of shoe wearing, particularly support shoe wearing, had atrophied, the better I felt.
The next obstacle was what to do about the potential to really hurt my feet on concrete streets and sidewalks? So back to the computer I went in search of foot protection. I had seen the toe shoes, vibramfivefingers I think they are called, but the idea of cramming my toes into little jackets seemed counter intuitive to me. The other thing I noticed was that the minimalist/zero drop running movement was in full swing and so shoes that were less shoes than protective covers were pretty pricey already. I tried running in moccasins but very quickly found that they wore out really fast and in the heat of summer were very hot. Then I read about the tarahumara
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnwIKZhrdt4 which lead me to Steven Sashen and Invisible shoes, now known as xero shoes
http://xeroshoes.com/. Well there has been no turning back. Thanks to Steve Gangemi and Steven Sashen I am literally back on my feet again and loving it.
It has been a slow and at times frustrating and painful process but I am finally able to run again almost completely pain free. To be fair the only time I end up hurt is because I forget to listen to my body and slow down, take a break, get more sleep, or eat better. Bad habits are hard to break and take a moment to learn and sometimes a lifetime to break. The biggest change I would say, next to ditching the shoes has been switching the motivation to run. I now run for the sheer joy of it. I don't try to best my times or distance. I run when my body tells me it is good to run and I stop, for the most part, when my body says "OK enough for today."
