Tradition Season

Ah, holiday tradition time.
Food, family, viciously competitive board games, crisp air, relearning the art of layering clothing, holiday cards & family updates that put my slim toilings to shame... maybe some more food.

Not all traditions are good. Enter my annual Thanksgiving injury. Yeah, steering this blog back to tri.

[No Christmas post. Yet. Can't blog without pics. That's a rule. In short, it was good. Not white. Everyone is here and healthy. Gas around town is at $1.77 to $1.95 for the cheap stuff.]

Last year: a nasty chest and back strain suffered raking leaves on T-day. This year's fun is more mysterious and less serious. Not quite as debilitating and quicker to heal. Strained lower back and ab/oblique thing over the pre T-day weekend. Quadratus Lumborum ("QL"), a back muscle connecting my right pelvis to the bottom right rib.
Not sure how it happened. Almost 1 yr to the day from the '07 event. (*note to self - next year crawl into a bunker in an undisclosed location and take the last week of November '09 off. Can I rent a rascal for a week so I don't even have to walk?)

Crap timing, of course. Was swimming faster than ever and in a groove hitting my Tue. & Thur. 6-7a swim sessions. Had my weekend daylight fun run up to 1hr50ish, feeling good during and recovering well after.

After about 10 days of olympic level eating and almost no exercise, I dusted off the scale. Up 7-8lbs. Late night Clif bar and cereal binges in front of the TV, on top of usual massive quantities of food are excellent plumper-uppers. I've got nothing on this bloke.

Feel just a little better about yourself now?
Go ahead, have another cookie. If you don't nab it he will.

Chiro/ART and hard core myofascial release style massage on the back and upper glutes has really helped, supplemented with similar self massage via the roller at home. Gradually returned to running after 2+ weeks. Same for swimming. Over 4 weeks in now, run and swim are feeling 95% normal re the injury spot.

Fortunately, I could limit my fitness losses by ride the trainer (aka "fencepost"), which I could do with zero QL discomfort, resulting in an unplanned week of 200miles cycling, my biggest bike week in a loooong time. How could I not have had many, many 200mi+ bike weeks in '08? 200 ain't nothing. It's tougher to get in miles this time of year (go hamster boy, go!), but only a couple 200+ weeks all year?

Back to roughly 100% now, time to steer back on track for winter work. Standard stuff, off season = putting time into strength and flexibility work, aka injury prevention or "prehab," stuff that falls by the wayside the rest of the year. Round the body out a bit.

Every coach and therapist I've seen over the years has zeroed in on my core/pelvis/glutes as the epicenter of my issues. The planned routine involves 20-30mins of pre-run dynamic stretching and muscle activation style work. If I stick with it, this should make me a stronger, more efficient person and injury free runner.

This video is spot on for my purposes, and for any runner really. It hits strength and flexibility and balance for run specific muscles, and brain tranis for run specific postures and movements. I'm doing it before every run.

One visible consequence of my weak medial glutes (among other things) is a rocking pelvis. This teeter-totter effect is a bad bad thing, with ramifications for IT Band and knee trouble, not to mention performance. See below my pelvis/hips tilting like there is a drunken puppeteer up above, or I'm working some invisible hulahoop. Pics are from the Nation's Triathlon, 9/13/08. Coming at the end of a hard race effort, there is some significant muscular fatigue going on, nicely bringing out the hip dip effect.

Rocking the pelvis - and one fishbelly white middle aged midriff.

I hear pale is the new tan for '09.

Thanks for reading.
Merry Christmas!