Fingers in symphony

Discovering pain-free running

IN

My relationship with running….

I used to have a bittersweet relationship with running, a heady romance that would have in the throes of pleasure at the beginning, but somewhere in the middle, the pleasure shapeshifted into mild annoyance and then intolerable pain as my steady leaps turned into limps and then unsteady steps to catch up.

Dejected by this toxic love but desperate to make it work, I tried a lot of things: a change of shoes, toe separators, hydration and they helped to an extent, but I somehow missed out on the most basic thing; something that would only be apparent after a fortnight’s worth of bed rest and care and several visits to the rheumatologist: I needed to take care of my body ( and my spine) more holistically.

Now, if you are anything like me, you must also hate the two things preceding and following the main workout- Warm up and cool down, your mind discards any number of advice or prescriptions about their benefits. But obviously, once you have been in the kind of pain that I were, you would start taking these advice seriously.

But how did I make it work this time?

To drown out my mind’s monologue whenever performing either of the two, I decided to either numb my mind through a playlist of my choice or replace the warm up and cool down sets with something I actually prefer to do. My favorite kind of cardio is HIIT( ideally on the elliptical) and my favorite kind of cool down is a series of gentle stretches that a Physiotherapist showed me back in November ( these can be done while lying down). The stretches are meant to work on your joints (spinal, legs and hips) and are a combination of the following:

Image Source: Pinterest

I started with 5 minutes for each of the sessions and then gradually increased it to 15 minutes, and I don’t feel any pain while and after my runs anymore.

I should have paid heed to what my body was trying to tell me much earlier, but I waited for it turn for the worse, but I hope this post encourages you to incorporate prep and recovery exercises in your workout sessions and your runs.