Most people equate stiffness and soreness with pain and discomfort, for me and well…other who run, workout and all that kind of stuff, tend to think that there is a huge difference. Stiffness and soreness tell me that I had a good workout yesterday or earlier that Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) thang, whereas pain and discomfort are warning signs that something is not right.

I know the differences, but unfortunately, I also ignore the differences too often.

This morning I woke up with soreness in the Achilles, calves, hamstrings and hips telling me that they had been used differently than they have been recently over the past couple of days. It did mean that that first five minutes after getting out of bed I looked more like Frankenstein stumbling around the bedroom, but things sorted themselves out and by the time I finished Bennie’s first walk, the old body was doing good. The normal aches and pains were there, but most of the stiffness in the legs was but a memory.

So the work I am doing seems to be working at least a little. Which is all I can ask for.

After re-reading Running Rewired some more, I do think that I am heading in the correct direction by using it as my primary precision and strength work program and will be going through its diagnostic tests today to see what I actually need to work on (a lot) versus what I think I need. From what I can digest from the three methods, for my purposes a synergistic meeting of the methods might just work to help me become a more antifragile runner.

Today, I had thought about moving to Pose Lesson 5 for the first time, but after thinking about what I want to accomplish today and that I have to mow the lawn later this afternoon. I think it would be better to wait a couple of more days and focus on lessons 3 and 4 some more, which lesson 4 seems to cover quite nicely.

Unfortunately, the “fall and “pull” of the Pose Method still seem more like abstract art to me. In other words I don’t really get it yet and it is the same stumbling block as the ChiRunning. However, I do see the need to continue working on my posture and single leg stance/form/pose and will help me even if I never “get” the fall/lean or pull/lift parts of ChiPose/PoseChi.

However, one day of precision/strength work showed me how badly I need to work the old body so that it is stronger or at least more resilient and this will be something that do more often moving forward. Probably at first I will do these on alternating days until I get the body acclimated to the new expectations. I am still thinking about whether to do them before or after my primary run.

WORKOUT

Planned: Do the ChiRunning warmup video, Pose Lesson 4 and once done with the short Pose run – if feeling good do an easy 1-2 mile run just to shake the remaining stiffness out of the legs. Monday’s are supposed to be more a rest day when I need it or a very easy run day. No real push or working on anything other than relaxing and just running.

What I did:

• Chi Running warm-up video and I even picked the jump rope and did some adjustments, along with 10 semi-hops. I will need to work on jumping rope technique and strengthening the body to be able to use it without face planting on the concrete floor. The ability to jump rope is one of those things that I never mastered growing up and it showed today when I attempted to try it this morning.
• Body weight perception drills—springiness position, running in place, and the running Pose.
• Pose hold drill for 30 seconds on each leg, for a set of three.
• Three reps of the wall-fall drill from the springiness position, and three reps on each leg from the running Pose.
• Three timber drill reps on each support leg from the Pose position.
• Change of support drill reps (10), resting thirty seconds between each.

I screwed up when I started my Garmin and then immediately paused it – oh well. I did work on the pulling and more of a forefoot landing and was doing well, until I saw the neighbor walking both dogs. I got to thinking about it and if I did my normal route, I would have to pass her twice and that just would not be kind, since the lab would get all excited (plus I didn’t want to take another chance on getting bit again), so I just did the .50 loop around the circle, which is a bit more challenging with the hill at the end. I think I did better than usual on the Pose Method pulling part, but the fall is still eluding me.

After finishing the short run and putting away the arm bands (yes, I used them again, but no metronome), I decided that there were too many vehicles and walkers to do Philbrick Laps and decided to do a couple of miles down to the ledges and back up Stevens Hill. Actually I was doing really good with the shorter strides and pulling, I even felt a good lean/fall once in a while.

Good enough that I decided to keep going when I reached the mile mark – that was a mistake.

I made it down to Troy Trail without any difficulty and even did well getting back to the 2.0 mile split. However, at that point the 80% humidity, sunshine, hardly any breeze and 70+% temps finally struck me down and I just went into passive survival shuffle, especially once I got going up Stevens Hill. The last mile wasn’t pretty and when I got done I looked as though I had gone swimming. Not really what I was looking for when I planned this “easy” run to say the least.

After I did a .5 cool-down walk (badly needed) around Howard Circle, I headed to the back of the garage again. I took about 10 minutes to get a little motivation back in the body and did the Running Rewired Hip video and while I didn’t do a great job form wise, I did better than I thought I would. Although I did skip the burpees, they would have done me in. I did finish up with the foam roller and car polisher massage work.

I was going to do the Running Rewired mobility tests, but by the time I got done, I was too knackered to even think about them.

I will do the mobility tests tonight and will probably do my Running Rewired work before starting the Pose Lessons or my usual run going forward. When I get back from the run, I am simply too tired to do more than an easy cool-down routine, some foam rolling and car polisher massaging of the legs. I know this stuff, but still it seems that I always have to re-learn it every time I re-start or add conditioning stuff back into my routines.

The bottom line is that I usually will not have enough umph left to do stuff after a run and if I do it is not the high quality that it needs to be.

Finally, I do notice that I have a lot less stamina to do all the stuff that I wanted to do and will have to space some of this stuff out over the course of a week versus doing it daily. Perhaps M-W-F for the Running Rewired precision/strength stuff, but no ChiRunning warm-ups on those days and no Pose Lessons, then on T-TH-SA do the ChiPose stuff. Sunday can be a longer run day where I only do the ChiRunning warm-up.

Right now I am just working on getting healthy again and looking at starting base building in September if the body is feeling decent. The biggest thing for me right now is that I want to build a more resilient and less fragile body, so that I can run comfortably and consistently over the next 10 years.

At least that is my long-term goal, but now I have to do the work.

Oh yeah, I got out of mowing the lawn this afternoon, thundershowers bounced around the neighborhood just enough to let me have the afternoon off, which was nice.