It is Super
Bowl Sunday! And for the first time in four years, I didn’t run the Kaiser 5K
in Golden Gate Park this morning. It wasn’t even on my radar that it was coming
up even though I’ve been quite aware (how could you not, living in SF?) of the
upcoming Super Bowl until I walked to a café by the park today and saw all the
runners trickling out onto the streets.
There was
awhile when I knew of races happening every weekend and was racing once a month
and loving it now I am not even aware of races happening mere steps from my
home! This is how much I have not been running.
Partly, I’ve
been super busy with about 18 different projects that have me sitting in front
of my computer and partly, when I have been running, I’ve been keeping my runs
slow, short and sweet because my body hasn’t been feeling right. It’s like I
have a mismatched pair of legs. My
pelvis has been mostly aligned so I’ve been fretting a bit about my legs,
rolling them and stretching and strength training and just hoping that it would
sort itself out.
And then one
of my clients, J, so generously gifted me three sessions to see a Muscle
Activation Technique (MAT) practitioner. MAT has helped J out so much over the
course of 6 sessions—he’d been dealing with a chronic injury which was nagging
on him for about nine months even though he was seeing a chiropractor/ART
practitioner, a rolfer, personal trainer and me. Nothing was working until he
tried MAT. Every week now, it is like J has shed another layer of the injury
and his stance, his gait and his posture have all changed dramatically.
Even this wasn’t
enough to make me think I should check it out for myself! And then J gifted me
sessions. I had my first this past Friday.
Matt, the
MAT practitioner, didn’t ask me anything about what was going on in my body but
had me lay down on a table and looked at my alignment. From that, he started
testing muscles to see what was causing overall misalignment. For example, he
wanted to check my multifidi (the deep stabilizing small muscles along the
spine). I just assumed that mine would be super strong because of all the work
that I’ve done targeting them specifically and the larger-movement, full-range
exercises that should have naturally recruited them. He tested them by putting
me in a position that would recruit them (lateral flexion, legs over to the
left side, left leg turned out, hands holding on to the side of the table) and
gently pulled my ankles to the right. The idea is that I should resist his pull
and not let my legs move. However, I couldn’t even begin to register where I
would possibly resist from and my legs slid across the table. He tried it again
and again and nothing.
He had me
turn over and then worked his thumb down the left side of my spine,
reactivating the multifdi and then tested again. Nothing. He tried to activate
again and again, I can’t resist. Matt then moves to the right side and then
targets the TFL, the glute maximus and medius, lats and psoas. I could not use
any one of these muslces on either the right or the left sides to resist his
very gentle pressure. Only the lats turned on very strongly after his
reactivation thumb-in-very-tender point technique. As he worked through my
body, I began to understand why I feel so uneven when I run.
He said that
it was common that people who train and use their bodies all the time, like
pilates instructors, dancers, etc., have a system that is so tired that no
muscles recruit to his testing but we also talked about chronic Lyme Disease
and how, because I had 3rd stage Lyme, and it both affected my
neurological functioning and severely taxed my body, that my muscles weren’t
activated.
Whatever it
was, when I stood up at the end of the session, I felt utterly balanced and
integrated. I also felt raw and vulnerable, like I was born into a new body
again.
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