Filed under: NBR Goings On, Pain | Tags: fun, health, injury, knees, racing, team, Workouts
Injury Prevention & Treatment Workshop
Injured? Don’t want to be? Either way, you should attend this informative workshop. Physical Therapist Jill Hoefs will be offering tips on how to prevent injuries, how to treat injuries, and how to recover from injuries. This is a must-attend for anyone who wants to run as much as they would like to. Being injured sucks – so let’s prevent it and figure out how to recover as quickly as possible. Open to members and friends. Free!
Date: Monday, April 5th
Time: 8:30pm-10pm
Where: Greenpoint Reformed Church – 136 Milton Street – Greenpoint, Brooklynn
Filed under: NBR Goings On, Workouts | Tags: fun, goal setting, health, injury, running, salon, winter, yoga
By popular demand, we’ve organized a Yoga for Runners Workshop! This is designed to introduce runners to the practice of yoga as an effective supplement to their training and races. Yoga instructor Maya Seidel will guide participants through a sample yoga session, focusing on poses which are specifically useful for runners. Special attention will be given to proper alignment, breath awareness, and balance. Following a period of guided relaxation and brief meditation, the workshop will conclude with a discussion about how to apply yoga to round out a workout.
Maya Seidel is a certified yoga instructor experienced with teaching yoga to children, adults, and seniors. For more information, please visit www.mayayoganyc.com.
This workshop will cost $2 for Greenpoint YMCA members, and $4 for non-YMCA members. We also will be collecting optional instructor tips to give to Maya.
Date: Sunday, February 28, 2010
Time: 1:30pm – 3:00pm
Location: Greenpoint YMCA – 99 Meserole Ave – Brooklyn NY – 11222
Hosted at the Greenpoint YMCA in the SACC room in the basement.
Also, you might want to bring your own mat if you have one.
See you Sunday!
Black toenails. No toenails. These are two extremely frightening things associated with runners. Your friends may ask you if you have toenails when you tell them you’re a runner. Dates may shy away from giving you foot massages after seeing your hooves.
Black toenails are caused primarily by two main things:
- Wearing shoes with a small toe box (or shoes that are too small)
- Doing lots of downhill running (in which case your toenails are slamming into the front of your shoe repeatedly)
As an ultrarunner who does lots of trail running, I fit into the latter category. I currently have one black toenail (how depressing). The main reason people have black toenails is because they are wearing shoes that are too small for them. I wear size eight shoes when I’m not running, but size 8.5 running shoes. This extra half a size gives my toenails extra space.
Of course, you can always end up removing your toenails like the infamous Marshall Ulrich!
- Cherie
For three hours I stood against a wall watching a woman have two centimeters of three surfaces (distal femur, proximal tibia, dorsal patella) of both her knees cut off and replaced with steel platforms, screwed into the sawed bone, on which plastic surfaces were attached to stand in for articular cartilage. If that sentence was hard to read, imagine what it was like to watch the operation wondering whether running was leading me to that surgery or protecting me from it with every day I ran. I was able to watch the surgery because I work in a lab doing biomedical research aimed at finding novel therapies for osteoarthritis. The news now being reported on the disease is that if you live long enough, you’ll get it. It’s apparently part of the process of living. But I’m not writing about osteoarthritis right now (if you’re interested in more on the subject, I’d be happy to address it, but I don’t want to be too dull for the rest of you right now). I’m interested in how we can damage our knees least as runners (and how the sport protects them). I think form is pretty important here.
There is a lot of research on this and a lot of conjecture on how to run most effectively. A very interesting article can be found on the Pose Method of running here.
There are also people trying to make money from changing our style of running: see Newton Running
Then again, I love Newtons, so perhaps you can see Newton as a company that is trying to take care of us. What I know is that there are runners out there who run as if there is no such thing as gravity, who have found an efficiency that makes gazelles look clumsy. And what I believe is that if I – or anyone for that matter – learn from them by watching them run, fewer people will end up on that operating table, forever after with steel and plastic to keep them walking and no longer able to run. You can see one of the people who makes me smile most when I watch him run here (Kenenisa Bekele).
And here’s Tirunesh Dibaba (the baby-faced destroyer), who improves my life just as much.
And with that… go out and heal your knees with a good run. I’ll explain the mechanics of why running is important for your knees later, but please go out there now and enjoy. Seriously. It’s important.
~ Owen
