Saturday morning I went for a run around Lake Calhoun with Scott. We chatted a great deal about personal histories and a little bit about politics. But the main feature for my current purposes was that my standard 4ish mile run knee pain was triggered. It wasn’t enough to stop me at the time, but Sunday, stepping down of the curb or down a stair hurt. Plus I had the muscle soreness to go with it.
Then today was gymnastics. I was wearing my knee brace, just in case. As part of warmup, we did a few backroll-into-handstands. Or rather, I tried. I think I tried 8 or 9 times. I only kneed myself in the face once when I collapsed. I nearly succeeded once. Clearly more practice is required. Then it was front tucks. Lots of front tucks. Given that my usual problem is under-rotation, it’s probably a good thing that my first tuck resulted in me landing first on my feet, then very quickly thereafter on my knees and chest. In fact, all of us using the same mat overrotated at first. Yay overrotation! After that, my compatriots expressed amazement at how high I jumped and yet how little I rotated. Still, I managed a few good tucks. Then when we were supposed to be putting the mats away, at the urging of these gentlemen, I did my first unspotted front handspring, and did a good one, if not for the minor collapse of my braced knee. I was up again in no time, none the worse for the wear.
Gymnastics is a hell of a lot of fun. It’s kind of sad that running and my knees get along so poorly, though. And now my back from the small of my back to the top of my spine is having heavy muscle fatigue ache going on. Whee-oof-Whee. =)
I sat through about 5 underrotation inward summersaults yesterday at practice before one of my kids finally got the balls to throw the dive and made an inward 1.25 landing on his chest. We called it a day and scratched that from his list for the next meet.
I remember my freshman year of high school on the track team. I didn’t last long. I stopped doing track and field when I missed a high jump, and landed on the bar, which drew blood because it was a triangular prism. I quit running after recognizing a pattern from meets where the distance between the runner in first and the next to last runner was a small fraction of the distance between the next to last runner and me. In a meet, I ran around a hurdle, went to the finish line, told the coach I quit, and went home. Never tried diving. But swim team I persisted and did well in. Go figure.
knees and running can agree…
Knee pain – unless it’s patellar degeneration – is almost always fixable. drop me an e and I’ll be happy to advise – after four years of running and coaching marathoners – I’ve seen nearly every type of running injury – from bee stings in scary places to whooping cough. Knees too.
Why does this post have no accompanying pictures of you doing the gymnastics? : )
It would be useful, though. Particularly to have a frame-by-frame view of what I do along side a frame-by-frame view of what the better tumblers are doing. =)