A Change in Direction and "Never Get Hurt" Drills

I set a goal that if I could run a 15 miler this week (after missing a week of running) that I would do the Great Bay 1/2 Marathon on Sunday. Thursday turned out to be the day. The weather was perfect so off I went on my run. My hips have been misaligned since I hurt my back. I am not sure if it is the tightness that is still in my back throwing things off or if I just lost the good balance I had because I can't yet do the exercises I was doing previously. I struggled through the run but I still ran 15 miles.

When I went to the Great Bay website to enter on Thursday night it would not let me register (even though the page said that registration was open until Friday morning). I tried again Friday morning but it still said my credit cards were invalid. They are not. I wrote an email to the race director but never heard back. I guess that is a good sign that I should do something else this weekend. If all goes well I will do the Nashua Soup Kitchen Run for Food & Shelter. It's right down the road and runs by my school and many of my student's neighborhoods. And when did they add a 10K to this race? It has always just been a 5k race, now you can do either distance. Choosing which to do will be an interesting decision. I guess it depends on how far I run today.

Here is a good looking set of exercises from Runner's World that are supposed to help you to "Never Get Hurt". They are very well presented and include a few new ones for me to try. You are advised to do them three times a week and they only take 20 minutes. My only thought is that if that girl demonstrating the videos wears those Nike Shox shoes out running, I can guarantee that she will be injured much earlier than she could ever imagine.

You can watch the whole "Never Get Hurt" series in sequence here. I have embedded each exercise seperately below. There are good explanations for doing each drill as well as a reason why each exercise is important.

Recover Those Old Runner's World Magazines

A couple of weeks ago a fellow runner gave me a box of old Runner's World magazines and booklets. Let me just say that Christmas came early as my Runner's World collection goes back to 1975 or so. These are black and white issues from the early 70's. Not only that but there were plenty of those old Runner's World booklets, year end yearbooks, and Olympic recap magazines. I had only bought a couple of the booklets when I was in high school and I have been kicking myself since. I have always wanted to read Ron Daws' "The Self Made Olympian" or any of the other biographies: Jack Foster, Frank Shorter, Dave Wottle, George Young, and Gerry Lindgren . Take a look at all that I have to read. I consider myself a lucky guy and thank the runner who wanted to give these away rather than throw them away!





Fortunately I have had time to read through a few of the books and flip through the magazines already. Unfortunately it was due to losing electricity for 5 days because of the ice storm. Here is a video of the damage around our house from all the branches and trees that fell.