Lately I've been biking most days and when I've been running, my legs feel heavy and thick and wooden, like I have lost any and all spring in my legs. I plod and it feels terrible which is why I have been biking or when I do run, being aware that I need to rest so running really easily, not thinking about time or distance but just enjoying being in motion and stopping or walking before anything starts to hurt or get really tired.
Since I moved, I've been getting up early and running in the park (and it's the best thing to start my day early and surrounded by so much beauty).
Pratyahara is the fifth element of the 8 stages of Ashtanga Yoga and is recognized in other disciplines. It means "withdrawal of the senses." In meditation, it is not being able to feel the boundary between your body and the world around you. It sounds like it would take years and hours of meditating to get there, but after I went through my Reiki attunements, it was so much easier for me to go deep in meditation--and I reached the state of pratyahara without even trying. It felt like being liquid in a liquid environment. Time both ceased and speeded up. I felt both whole and a part of all that is. I wanted to stay there forever and sat, that day, for hours.
There are times when I am giving Reiki sessions where it feels like my hands disappear. I can both not tell the delineation between my hands and the person's body I am working on or the boundary between my hands the air around them. It is not them going numb because numbness has the distinct feeling of absence and anxiety, the exact opposite of this happening. I call it pratyahara of the hands, half joking, and when this happens to me, it feels like my hands are both present but in another dimension or on a higher plane or something but wherever they are is where I would like to be.
Anyway, I give all this very odd background to say that while I was running yesterday, the same thing happened to my body from the waist down. My hips and legs and feet were moving beneath me, but it felt, again, like they were liquid in a liquid environment, themselves but also a part of the air around them. I was breathing hard and working, but even so, my legs were light and I ran all the way to the beach and back, more than twice as far as I have been running, without any pain or heaviness and though I ran with effort, I also ran with seemingly endless amounts of energy. I have had days when I have run and it has felt effortless, easy and I could run really far and fast. These other occasions have been purely ones of physical readiness. Yesterday, it was spiritual. And today, I don't feel sore or tired or worked and better than that, the sensation of running on wooden legs is completely gone.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Monday, August 20, 2012
Olympic inspiration
The 2012 Olympics are all wrapped up and put away and though there were myriad accomplishments to find inspiration in--the Spanish Synchronized Swim team, Michael Phelps, Lithuania making the US basketball team WORK for their win, Usian Bolt & Shelley-Anne Pryce, seeing Shalane Flanagan hit the ground after crossing the finish line and realizing that she had just give EVERYTHING she had to make it there--what most inspired me was Oksana Chusovitina, the 37-year old, 6-time Olympic gymnast. Most gymnasts' careers are over by their mid-twenties at the latest, similar to dancers and football players, due to injury, extreme training, pushing the body to the breaking point and then still demanding more of it, without much chance to heal. Chusovitina competed with women who weren't even born when she first started competing on the international level.
Most gymnasts and many athletes begin to bow out of professional competition beginning in their mid-twenties through their thirties but the average person feels these changes, too. Often, my pilates students complain of 'everything going downhill after thirty,' or 'age catching up with them' as they become aware of how they take longer to recover from workouts, get injured with more frequency and notice that they don't heal nearly as fast.
I always laugh and tell them to watch their beliefs--I for one, have never felt better. I also know my body so much better and have much more control and precision in how I move and an incredible breadth of knowledge and resources to pull from when I need to heal. I dont think that it's age as much as most people have never had to watch their bodies with care and so haven't taken the time to learn that they need to treat themselves differently as they age to still do the same things that they have always done. I also think that part of what we call the aging process is the accumulation of restrictions built up over a lifetime of activity and which were never taken care of so the accumulation finally causes imbalances and discomfort and sets us up for injury.
To see Oksana perform with girls two decades younger than she was inspiring, yes, but what really resonated with me was to read her say that she "never thought of quitting a sport she said comes more easily to her than it used to."
At 40, Jordan Jovtchev is also an older Olympic gymnast, but when he talks about competeting now, he talks about pain: "It’s very, very difficult for me now because my body is falling apart if I practice hard...Ugh, you get the pain and then you start moving a little bit and then you get used to it, like an engine getting going — chug, chug, chug."
I can't get behind performing in pain. I mean, I get it in Jovtchev's instance. To perform at the level that he does and to have spent his entire life in gymnastics and to reach yet another Olympics? I would, too. For sure. But for the average person, training in pain really doesn't make sense. I have in the past and I understand why people do, but I have finally learned how to allow myself to fully rest and recuperate over weeks instead of a day here or there. We get stronger when we rest. It took a decade of treatment for chronic illness for me to learn this and I learned it mostly through others. I have trained people extensively, people who were training for a major event and were also seeing a personal trainer and doing their own scheduled workouts and they'd plateau and the thing that would move them to the next level was always rest. A full two weeks of eating a lot and not even thinking about working out. Our bodies heal and develop strength when we rest, not when we work out. They'd come back and were suddenly doing work which they'd only been approximating previously.
Chusovitina's coach only lets her train an hour and a half a day, which she admits is difficult for her, but she also says that she knows her body better now and I wonder if she also knows the exercises so much better that she requires less effort and time working on them? I mean, if she has a full two decades more practicing the same exercises, she must do them more efficiently now than she used to and also, probably owns them in a very different way than the young girls.
The body changes as we age, but I think that if we pay attention and modify how we approach all things in life, we can feel strong and powerful, move with ease and keep doing the things we have always done without detriment.
Most gymnasts and many athletes begin to bow out of professional competition beginning in their mid-twenties through their thirties but the average person feels these changes, too. Often, my pilates students complain of 'everything going downhill after thirty,' or 'age catching up with them' as they become aware of how they take longer to recover from workouts, get injured with more frequency and notice that they don't heal nearly as fast.
I always laugh and tell them to watch their beliefs--I for one, have never felt better. I also know my body so much better and have much more control and precision in how I move and an incredible breadth of knowledge and resources to pull from when I need to heal. I dont think that it's age as much as most people have never had to watch their bodies with care and so haven't taken the time to learn that they need to treat themselves differently as they age to still do the same things that they have always done. I also think that part of what we call the aging process is the accumulation of restrictions built up over a lifetime of activity and which were never taken care of so the accumulation finally causes imbalances and discomfort and sets us up for injury.
To see Oksana perform with girls two decades younger than she was inspiring, yes, but what really resonated with me was to read her say that she "never thought of quitting a sport she said comes more easily to her than it used to."
At 40, Jordan Jovtchev is also an older Olympic gymnast, but when he talks about competeting now, he talks about pain: "It’s very, very difficult for me now because my body is falling apart if I practice hard...Ugh, you get the pain and then you start moving a little bit and then you get used to it, like an engine getting going — chug, chug, chug."
I can't get behind performing in pain. I mean, I get it in Jovtchev's instance. To perform at the level that he does and to have spent his entire life in gymnastics and to reach yet another Olympics? I would, too. For sure. But for the average person, training in pain really doesn't make sense. I have in the past and I understand why people do, but I have finally learned how to allow myself to fully rest and recuperate over weeks instead of a day here or there. We get stronger when we rest. It took a decade of treatment for chronic illness for me to learn this and I learned it mostly through others. I have trained people extensively, people who were training for a major event and were also seeing a personal trainer and doing their own scheduled workouts and they'd plateau and the thing that would move them to the next level was always rest. A full two weeks of eating a lot and not even thinking about working out. Our bodies heal and develop strength when we rest, not when we work out. They'd come back and were suddenly doing work which they'd only been approximating previously.
Chusovitina's coach only lets her train an hour and a half a day, which she admits is difficult for her, but she also says that she knows her body better now and I wonder if she also knows the exercises so much better that she requires less effort and time working on them? I mean, if she has a full two decades more practicing the same exercises, she must do them more efficiently now than she used to and also, probably owns them in a very different way than the young girls.
The body changes as we age, but I think that if we pay attention and modify how we approach all things in life, we can feel strong and powerful, move with ease and keep doing the things we have always done without detriment.
Monday, August 13, 2012
running distractions
I woke up this morning as the sun was rising and my first thought was, I need to go run at the beach! A half hour later, there I was, decked out in wool hat, leggings and warm jacket. The morning was white. Seriously. The fog was so thick this morning, I could only see about ten feet around me. It dulled the sound of the ocean and I felt insulated. Quiet.
I love mornings like this. I love running into the fog and feeling so alone. Just me and the beach and running.
And yet. It's been months since I woke up and the first thing I wanted to do was to run. Part of it was injury but a lot of it was joining a running club and setting training goals for myself. All of a sudden, I was quantifying my running.
When I first ran competitively, in high school, I didn't really care about my stats. I was running track mainly to get faster for my soccer game. Kinda like some students took Latin in high school so that they'd score better on their SATs. That was me and soccer. Just trying to get faster, quicker, better.
I kept running after high school, but for general fitness. I ran in the Berkeley and Oakland hills in college and then afterwards, ran around Central Park, using my runs as an escape from my urban life. I ran when I was diagnosed with Lyme's Disease and still ran, that first year that I lived with my parents, even though my life had become a merry-go-round of doctor's visits and utter illness. I ran simply because I was in denial that I was sick, that I should rest, that I could no longer do this thing that I'd let come to define me.
Only after a year of treatment, with my memory still shot and my mind still groggy and out of focus, did I stop running. My Lyme specialist told me that every time I did cardio, I opened the blood-brain barrier and let more of the Lyme bacteria move into my brain. That was enough to set me straight: I could deal with the pain and the fatigue of Lyme, but I hated feeling disoriented and unable to understand the world around me.
I started taking long walks in that time and never even considered lacing on my running shoes. Five year later, I started running again on a lark. I felt wobbly and silly and it was hard! Mostly because I live on a hill and run out the door and up a hill for a good mile and then it loops around and down and flattens out and then I run back up for another mile or so to get home. Such is the nature of living in San Francisco though.
When I started, I'd have to stop and walk frequently. I didn't really mind it and either began running when I was ready to again or walked the rest of the way home. For the rest of that year, I put on my running shoes often and soon ran much faster and further than when I began (obviously), but I never judged myself if I had to walk the whole way. Or cut my run short. Or run further and easier than I had planned. I just loved everything about being outside, in motion, and enjoyed watching the pink sunset light up the houses on San Bruno and the the fog rolling in from the ocean. I liked looking at the houses I ran by and thinking about who made the wooden planes and hung them from a tree or crammed three fountains into an entryway the size of a shoebox or what the view must be like from the house on stilts on the side of the hill. I checked out my neighbor's poppy garden (so friggin' beautiful) and watched another neighbor's squash vines slowly work their way along the sidewalk, the flowers shriveling and the squash filling out.
I ran or walked to simply be present, to take note of the world around me, to move. It was the one part of my life where I was easy with myself, utterly without judgement and completely present with the state of my body. I ran when I was able to, slowed when I needed, walked often and would take days off when my body clamored for rest.
And then I joined a running club. Which I loved for the companionship and the other runners' knowledge and experience . But I also immediately made a running schedule: Monday, Wednesday and Saturdays were my running days. And I now had to commit one of them to a long run and I needed to keep track of that run and know how far and how fast I went so that I could increase it according to a schedule.
I started evaluating my runs and forcing myself to complete them according to schedule. I burned out. Running wasn't fun anymore, it had become another place in my life where I needed to perform to certain standards. Along the way, my ITB's knotted up as did my peroneals and posterior tibs.
Now that I had a running schedule, I stopped listening to my body and pushed it to complete the scheduled runs (silly, I know). To keep out there, I started getting weekly massages and shifted the focus of my monthly acupuncture sessions to my legs. Until finally, I stopped.
After months of running rest, today is the first day I woke up with running on my mind as this thing that I get to do.
This morning I ran a couple of miles north. They felt good. The fog lifted by the time I reached the north end of the park. The shoreline was packed with runners and walkers and birds. I watched some seagulls rip apart a crab and a paddle boarder moving out to sea. I took off my shoes and waded in the water and then started walking south again. I waded in until my knees were covered and walked back to my car, wishing I was wearing a suit to swim. I saw the sun break through the fog and checked to see what the fishermen had caught.
I was out on the beach for nearly two hours and only ran for the first thirty minutes of it but I had such a wonderful morning and know that I'll be waking up again soon to head out on a run.
I love mornings like this. I love running into the fog and feeling so alone. Just me and the beach and running.
And yet. It's been months since I woke up and the first thing I wanted to do was to run. Part of it was injury but a lot of it was joining a running club and setting training goals for myself. All of a sudden, I was quantifying my running.
When I first ran competitively, in high school, I didn't really care about my stats. I was running track mainly to get faster for my soccer game. Kinda like some students took Latin in high school so that they'd score better on their SATs. That was me and soccer. Just trying to get faster, quicker, better.
I kept running after high school, but for general fitness. I ran in the Berkeley and Oakland hills in college and then afterwards, ran around Central Park, using my runs as an escape from my urban life. I ran when I was diagnosed with Lyme's Disease and still ran, that first year that I lived with my parents, even though my life had become a merry-go-round of doctor's visits and utter illness. I ran simply because I was in denial that I was sick, that I should rest, that I could no longer do this thing that I'd let come to define me.
Only after a year of treatment, with my memory still shot and my mind still groggy and out of focus, did I stop running. My Lyme specialist told me that every time I did cardio, I opened the blood-brain barrier and let more of the Lyme bacteria move into my brain. That was enough to set me straight: I could deal with the pain and the fatigue of Lyme, but I hated feeling disoriented and unable to understand the world around me.
I started taking long walks in that time and never even considered lacing on my running shoes. Five year later, I started running again on a lark. I felt wobbly and silly and it was hard! Mostly because I live on a hill and run out the door and up a hill for a good mile and then it loops around and down and flattens out and then I run back up for another mile or so to get home. Such is the nature of living in San Francisco though.
When I started, I'd have to stop and walk frequently. I didn't really mind it and either began running when I was ready to again or walked the rest of the way home. For the rest of that year, I put on my running shoes often and soon ran much faster and further than when I began (obviously), but I never judged myself if I had to walk the whole way. Or cut my run short. Or run further and easier than I had planned. I just loved everything about being outside, in motion, and enjoyed watching the pink sunset light up the houses on San Bruno and the the fog rolling in from the ocean. I liked looking at the houses I ran by and thinking about who made the wooden planes and hung them from a tree or crammed three fountains into an entryway the size of a shoebox or what the view must be like from the house on stilts on the side of the hill. I checked out my neighbor's poppy garden (so friggin' beautiful) and watched another neighbor's squash vines slowly work their way along the sidewalk, the flowers shriveling and the squash filling out.
I ran or walked to simply be present, to take note of the world around me, to move. It was the one part of my life where I was easy with myself, utterly without judgement and completely present with the state of my body. I ran when I was able to, slowed when I needed, walked often and would take days off when my body clamored for rest.
And then I joined a running club. Which I loved for the companionship and the other runners' knowledge and experience . But I also immediately made a running schedule: Monday, Wednesday and Saturdays were my running days. And I now had to commit one of them to a long run and I needed to keep track of that run and know how far and how fast I went so that I could increase it according to a schedule.
I started evaluating my runs and forcing myself to complete them according to schedule. I burned out. Running wasn't fun anymore, it had become another place in my life where I needed to perform to certain standards. Along the way, my ITB's knotted up as did my peroneals and posterior tibs.
Now that I had a running schedule, I stopped listening to my body and pushed it to complete the scheduled runs (silly, I know). To keep out there, I started getting weekly massages and shifted the focus of my monthly acupuncture sessions to my legs. Until finally, I stopped.
After months of running rest, today is the first day I woke up with running on my mind as this thing that I get to do.
This morning I ran a couple of miles north. They felt good. The fog lifted by the time I reached the north end of the park. The shoreline was packed with runners and walkers and birds. I watched some seagulls rip apart a crab and a paddle boarder moving out to sea. I took off my shoes and waded in the water and then started walking south again. I waded in until my knees were covered and walked back to my car, wishing I was wearing a suit to swim. I saw the sun break through the fog and checked to see what the fishermen had caught.
I was out on the beach for nearly two hours and only ran for the first thirty minutes of it but I had such a wonderful morning and know that I'll be waking up again soon to head out on a run.
Sunday, July 29, 2012
It has been a long crazy road the past year and I have not done much running at all. I'm back--I think.
I stopped running for a few months from a combination of sheer exhaustion (Lyme will do that to you), a relationship gone wrong, shin splints and work blowing up (in a good way:).
The shin splints and relationship are long gone. I'm still dealing with a whole lotta tired though. After taking several months off of running (and right when I was getting into my groove and doing 10-15 mile long runs and feeling good about it, too!) I started off with baby steps two weeks ago: I've been doing a few run-walks for under three miles.
Today I ran three miles and I felt really good during it, too. Afterwards, I had that crazy lyme-tired that knocks me on my ass and smothers me. Maybe I pushed myself too hard? I'm going to try another 3 mile walk-run again tomorrow evening. Maybe I'll take it a bit slower.
I did have a reiki session after the run. Aaaaaaah! better than slipping into a hot tub after a long snow-day! Just absolutely heaven. It worked all the tension out of my legs and relaxed my jaw. I feel renewed now.
I stopped running for a few months from a combination of sheer exhaustion (Lyme will do that to you), a relationship gone wrong, shin splints and work blowing up (in a good way:).
The shin splints and relationship are long gone. I'm still dealing with a whole lotta tired though. After taking several months off of running (and right when I was getting into my groove and doing 10-15 mile long runs and feeling good about it, too!) I started off with baby steps two weeks ago: I've been doing a few run-walks for under three miles.
Today I ran three miles and I felt really good during it, too. Afterwards, I had that crazy lyme-tired that knocks me on my ass and smothers me. Maybe I pushed myself too hard? I'm going to try another 3 mile walk-run again tomorrow evening. Maybe I'll take it a bit slower.
I did have a reiki session after the run. Aaaaaaah! better than slipping into a hot tub after a long snow-day! Just absolutely heaven. It worked all the tension out of my legs and relaxed my jaw. I feel renewed now.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
the jaw-pelvis connection or, these are my teeth.
ok, so I just got back from a trip to the dentist followed up by a visit to my chiropracter.
I should start with this: I have broken my jaw three times. The first time, I was in grade school and got high sticked in the face during field hockey. We went to the dentist and he said that it was still aligned and would heal on its own. The second time, I was playing soccer in high school. Long story short there was a fight and I ended up on the ground and a girl kicked me in the face. That time, my face was visibly crooked but we went to the dentist and he said that it would set just fine. At the time, I was an incredibly angry teen and hated getting attention for my looks and much preferred a crooked face and fought with my mom about getting a second opinion. If only I had known what havoc a mis-aligned jaw can do to the body.
The third time I broke my jaw, I was in college, drunk and got into a fight and got my face kicked in.
By that time, I was already so sick with undiagnosed Lyme's Disease that it took everything that I had to get through the day and simply scheduling an appointment (Lyme takes out the executive function of the brain and makes you a stranger to yourself and makes doing even small tasks practically impossible) let alone getting to one, was out of my reach.
So there you go, three major jaw traumas.
Let's back up a bit. Jaw trauma and it healed so whatever, right? that is what I thought for years! but the thing is, the jaw is super important and affects so much of the body. The jaw and pelvis are closely related as they are directly linked by fascia (the deep front line), sit at opposite ends of the spine, have similar structure and often mirror each other in misalignment and tension. With either or both the jaw and pelvis out of alignment, then the spine will be too, because the body adapts however it needs to to keep the eyes and brain level to the ground.
I ended up working with a new dentist years after all these injuries. I only went because one of my Lyme doctors said that I would never fully heal as long as my jaw was so out of alignment. His theory is that, if the jaw, spine and pelvis are chronically out of alignment, then the neurological system can never function to full potential. By the time I went to see Dr. Hites, my jaw had slide left by a full half inch. In response to its new placement, one of my cervical vertebrate kept sliding out of alignment, my thoracic locked up often and my low back hurt all the time. Of course, I didn't know that when I first went to see him.
Over the past years, I have been outfitted with a series of different mouth guards, retainers and appliances to stabilize my jaw, open up my palate and the left side of my jaw. Within the first month, my neck stabilized and my thoracic released. With assistance from an osteopath and a physical therapist, I re-aligned--and held the re-alignment--my pelvis and my low back pain is all but gone.
It's been incredible to experience the systemic release of tension and pain.
I should start with this: I have broken my jaw three times. The first time, I was in grade school and got high sticked in the face during field hockey. We went to the dentist and he said that it was still aligned and would heal on its own. The second time, I was playing soccer in high school. Long story short there was a fight and I ended up on the ground and a girl kicked me in the face. That time, my face was visibly crooked but we went to the dentist and he said that it would set just fine. At the time, I was an incredibly angry teen and hated getting attention for my looks and much preferred a crooked face and fought with my mom about getting a second opinion. If only I had known what havoc a mis-aligned jaw can do to the body.
The third time I broke my jaw, I was in college, drunk and got into a fight and got my face kicked in.
By that time, I was already so sick with undiagnosed Lyme's Disease that it took everything that I had to get through the day and simply scheduling an appointment (Lyme takes out the executive function of the brain and makes you a stranger to yourself and makes doing even small tasks practically impossible) let alone getting to one, was out of my reach.
So there you go, three major jaw traumas.
Let's back up a bit. Jaw trauma and it healed so whatever, right? that is what I thought for years! but the thing is, the jaw is super important and affects so much of the body. The jaw and pelvis are closely related as they are directly linked by fascia (the deep front line), sit at opposite ends of the spine, have similar structure and often mirror each other in misalignment and tension. With either or both the jaw and pelvis out of alignment, then the spine will be too, because the body adapts however it needs to to keep the eyes and brain level to the ground.
I ended up working with a new dentist years after all these injuries. I only went because one of my Lyme doctors said that I would never fully heal as long as my jaw was so out of alignment. His theory is that, if the jaw, spine and pelvis are chronically out of alignment, then the neurological system can never function to full potential. By the time I went to see Dr. Hites, my jaw had slide left by a full half inch. In response to its new placement, one of my cervical vertebrate kept sliding out of alignment, my thoracic locked up often and my low back hurt all the time. Of course, I didn't know that when I first went to see him.
Over the past years, I have been outfitted with a series of different mouth guards, retainers and appliances to stabilize my jaw, open up my palate and the left side of my jaw. Within the first month, my neck stabilized and my thoracic released. With assistance from an osteopath and a physical therapist, I re-aligned--and held the re-alignment--my pelvis and my low back pain is all but gone.
It's been incredible to experience the systemic release of tension and pain.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)