Stride Right!

Hello Everybody (all 5 or 6 of you) ;-)

First things first. Jenny, I am glad you are on the mend!

I am pretty confident that I found out why I am injured. Now, maybe I have missed something, but whenever I have read an article about stride it is usually about stride length, pace, how to land on your foot, etc.

Well, let me explain what happened first! I went for a run after work today! The first 1.5 miles went great. Yes, I felt a tightness in my right outer quad but I can deal with a little pain. It's not the pain that bothers me, its the weakness and risk of further injury. Anyway, at 1.5 - 1.7 miles it started to hurt in the sense that it was locking up on me. During this time, I looked down and noticed something. When my rear foot/leg is moving forward and passing the ground foot it is only an inch to the side.

My stride needs to be wider. I haven't read about evaluating that before! Or at least I don't remember.

So I worked on it! At first the pain wasn't any better and after about another .3 miles, I walked. I ended up walking for about a 1/2 mile. My walk is the same, too narrow, so I worked on it then. It's kind of weird, I had to mentally think of a skinny book between my legs just below my crotch to keep my feet even in front of me.

After 1/2 mile of walking, I ran. Yes, the pain was there, but I was able to keep running for another 1.5 miles, constantly correcting my stride. It's going to take a while for that to be natural.

As short of a distance as that is, there is no way I would have been able to do that earlier this week.

I am not sure what my run will be like on Sunday. Obviously, it will not be the quality pace that I had planned. But for now, running the right stride and finishing the 10 miles (even with some walk, if I have to) is good enough for me!

For Now!

Stretching is going really good. I thought I was taking that seriously, but I was wrong. I am stretching twice a day until my flexibility maintains, then maybe I can decrease to 5X week.