Downhills and Uphills: The Millenium Mile

I ran the Millennium Mile on Sunday with my family. There is not much to write about as it was my slowest time ever on the course. From the first steps I knew I would not have an easy time of it. My finish time reflects how stiff and awkward I felt. I have had a couple of minor sicknesses that have limited my running (plus five days without electricity!). I also have not kept up with my stretching and other work. I have had a few good days of running lately, but mostly I have had days where I can't get things back into balance. I had been stuck for the two days before the race with my left knee twisting in and that lower leg twisting out with a weird pronation. Before the race I tried all my strategies but I couldn't get anything to get my legs back in balance. So I ran the race on twisted legs and hips and it wasn't fun. Even though it was a downhill race, I felt like I was running uphill!

After the race I went back to checking things out again to find out what is wrong with my body. Is it the feet throwing off my hips or my hips throwing off my legs? I went back to some pages I had bookmarked on the sacroiliac joint. I was reading through one page and tried this easy movement on both hips.


This is what I did: While lying on my back, I pulled the right knee snuggly to my chest to rotate the pelvis up in front. I held tightly with my arms around my knee and then pushed my knee out against my arms to cause the pelvis to shift downward in back of the sacrum. I tried to feel my back flatten. I did it 3 times for 10 seconds on each side. That is all I did except that I also tried it in the sitting position.

The site I got this version from seems to imply that the opposite side sacrum may cause the damage that you feel on the out of alignment leg. I also realize that this information owes a lot to Richard DonTigny's site which I have previously seen and bookmarked. Here are his exercises. Maybe previously I have tried too many of them or my body wasn't in the right mood for them to work, or the stars and moon weren't aligned properly, or who know why things work and don't work on my body?

Soon after this adjustment my hips felt completely balanced and free again. I didn't have the uncomfortable feeling of my hips being off and muscles in the hip and back pulling. I could stand balanced on my left leg. My legs weren't bent out and were much more even. In other words I was feeling great again. I couldn't wait to go running the next day and had a easy and quick 8 mile run where I didn't have to constantly adjust my stride. I kept doing the movement here and there during the day and while I was playing Monopoly on the floor with my daughter I tried it again. All of a sudden there was a very loud "THWACK" in my left hip. I didn't feel a thing but everyone in the room sat up and asked, "What was that?" It seemed that my leg (femur) had popped into place or something as it sounded like a giant Lego piece being snapped into another. I didn't feel any different, but maybe something got repositioned. It is just another strange noise my leg has made this year.

My hip still felt fine all day today. I ran on the treadmill which is something I find hard to do as it usually points out very clearly the imbalances in my stride and I have to concentrate hard on positioning. Today I just flowed along with the treadmill. The run was easy. I have no clue when my body will break down again and when it does, I probably won't be able to get it back in the same way. However the dramatic change between the the feeling of imbalance and balance lets me think that I have to target the sacroiliac joints.

I can stretch my muscles through resistance stretching, mobilize my joints through Z-Health, work on my strength and core, stretch my fascia through The Ming Method, and do releases for the leg muscles, but none of those worked so quickly to resolve the imbalances as that one sacroiliac movement did. I remember too that it was another stretch for the sacrum area that put my hips in balance after the Applefest Half-Marathon!

Now if only I could redo that Millennium Mile!

The Dorn Method: Can it be a simple fix for misaligned joints?

The past week my running wasn't going well. My left psoas continued to be tight as well as my left gluteus miniumus, piriformis, or something else back there that was real tight. I also had stiffness along the sacrum. It got that way last summer for almost two months and nothing I tried could ease the tightness. I knew I was headed in a wrong direction when I thought about using a heel lift again (never works-but who knows).

I was checking things out on the internet to see what else was out there: stretches were tending to make things worse. I came across something on Youtube that I had never heard of or seen before but it looked promising.

Hip Exercise




Sacrum Exercise





So I read what I could find and decided to check out further this Dorn Method. Seems it came from Germany and it is called a gentle relative to chiropractic and osteopathy. It was developed by and is touted as for non-medical practitioners. The founder meant for it to be shared freely and it can be used for self-help. Well that sounded a little different but I checked out the exercises and they seemed simple, gentle, and they made sense.

The exercises like many newer modalities involve movement and not just static stretching.The movement helps distract the muslces as you work on the joint. After reading about the method, I tried a few exercises and while they were nothing difficult, by the time I was done (just a few minutes) the tightness on my left side was gone and my leg was moving smoother. I actually felt movement within the left hip as I walked. The next day I felt fine again and when I did my run, I was running smoother than I had in over a week. In fact I noticed that my back and hip were not "stuck" so my quads and hamstrings were doing more of the running and were not hindered by the limited range of motion in my hips. Today I felt good but I didn't have a chance to run due to almost 12 hours of teaching, meetings, and workshops. I look forward to seeing if the exercises help compliment what I am already doing.

Some of the exercises (I did not do them all) work with movements similar to the joint mobility work I am doing, but the add a component of having a small force or pressure pushing on a joint or muscle. The self-help page displays many of the exercises. I also bought and downloaded the e-book here because it was less than $10 and I wanted to read what I could on the method and it was easier to refer to the exercises from a printout than on my computer screen. It looks like it may serve to unstick the joints around my hip and lower back and if it can do that it would be a great tool to know and use. I used the hip and sacrum exercises as well as the knee and ankle routines. I like that it is simple and sensible. The e-book also tells you what stretches and positions to avoid (some of them were ones I do to try to fix my back that seem to work at first but then throw other things off).