Rock and roll season is going swimmingly. I’m enjoying the shorter, (slightly) faster stuff. And now I’m busy packing for a trip to see my boys in Taiwan – the excitement! And to cap off this awesome trip, I suspect they may have entered me into a Taiwanese race. I was asked for my passport number and told to bring my running shoes. As if I would go anywhere without them! Running is by far the best way to tour anywhere – I’ve done Cape Town and Soweto, and now I’m going international!
More of my running travels in a month’s time though. Today’s running excitement is also threatening to blow some sort of gasket if I don’t reveal the fact that at last I can say I can run…. Not jog, not shuffle – RUN! For months now I’ve been working on a faster cadence and on my style. I can’t say that I have followed Danny Dreyer’s book/lessons in Chi running (I hate doing drills) – but the basis of my new style is Chi running. The strike is on the ball of my foot, my arms are swinging correctly, and I’VE GOT THE LEAN! It suddenly fell into place this last Sunday when we did our long run. I thought it may be a fluke so I tried it again this morning. Once your foot is striking correctly under your hips and you lean slightly forward (from the ankles NOT the hips) and your steps are small and fast, WOW – it’s an amazing difference. You can feel all the work is in your glutes, which is where it should be, and it just feels RIGHT! It takes patience though. At first it felt like harder work than my normal shuffle, but with a lot of walk breaks and frequent re-aligning of posture, my plan came together!