Still in the land of injury - as far as running is concerned anyway. Strava tells me I've been averaging 1 run a week and 5 miles for the last 4 weeks. After my last enthusiastic post I ran myself into the ground again so I couldn't walk properly, and somewhere in that time I seem to have got the message that I'm not going to get away with just pushing through this time. I reluctantly gave away my Edinburgh Marathon place because it was one of the things that kept tempting me to up my mileage. I'm TRYING to run by feel and so work within the margins of what my leg can handle. There should be a 12 step program for it. Numbers anonymous. That's not a very good name - but - trying to hit a number rather than tuning into yourself to see what the 'right amount' might be - which is, of course, multi-factorial and ever-changing.
In the meantime I've been swimming more than I have for years. I've swum more than 17 miles this year! Again - according to Strava. It is very busy at the pool so not always the most relaxing thing, but with a 2 mile round trip on my legs to get there it makes a nice little package of exercise.
It means I'm spending a lot of time in Leith. Walking with a limp doesn't mark me out in the least because I'd say 70% of the people on the streets in Leith have something wrong with their legs. Leith Walk is under continual construction with the wretched trams so me and the other Leithers are funnelled into little rat runs down the side of the pavement where we have to negotiate our respective limping speeds.
Blogger has started doing this annoying thing in the last year where it uploads your most recent photos 1st. I've rearranged them in the past, but I can't be bothered. So...most recent first....I went a cycle through the Pentlands on Monday. I've been thinking about going for a while but couldn't quite find the enthusiasm. On Monday I knew Peter was going to look for green hairstreaks on the gorse near the firing range there. First of all I thought I might meet up with him and then I thought I would definitely not as I would be there a lot earlier than him but then I made some odd route choices to get there and found that in fact I wasn't earlier than him at all. So I pushed my bike up the steep hill to near the firing range and chatted with Nick while Peter filled his camera with shots of green hairstreaks.
Afterwards Peter came with me (he had his bike with him) through the hills and then down the other side - the Water of Leith and all that. I am still super-cautious about cycling on gravel - I know it's ridiculous on a mountain-bike but I just can't take the thought of coming off my bike and hurting myself again. As it happens, I did in fact fall off my bike coming down off the Water of Leith onto the canal but it was entirely my own fault and in fact didn't hurt myself in the least apart from some impressive looking scratches.
We took the van out for a run recently just to see if it was still working. Now that there is no running there isn't so much incentive to go anywhere so it has been sitting kerb-side and rusting away. We took a trip to Postman's Walk at the back of Aberlady and had a look for orange tips (none), Holly Blues (none - although someone else saw some just the next day.) What we did see was one tortoiseshell butterfly so Peter photographed the hell out of it. We were heckled by a small but noisy robin.
And then there have been other cycles. I really hate cycling on the roads now so I'm always looking for road-free routes. It isn't easy. There's a lot of good intention in Edinburgh about cycle routes it seems - and quite a lot of optimistic sign-posting of cycle routes - that aren't that easy to follow. Since I'm just generally out to get some exercise anyway I don't mind getting lost a bit - it's always a good way of putting new routes together. One low point was finding myself at the notorious Sheriffhall roundabout the other day. That didn't seem optimal. I would love to go further and for longer but I think what I'm really going to need to do is put the bike in the van and get out of Edinburgh first.
A big favourite is cycling round the Dalmeny estate where it's only the first mile to the cycle-path that I really have to share with traffic.
I have a thing I'm trying now since I'm injured anyway. I read a book by Sarah Warren called The Pain Relief Secret. I know how that title sounds. Like every other faddy book in the world claiming to have a solution to some problem which is likely not really a homogenous entity in the first place but rather a vague descriptor like "brain fog" that could be so many different things that everyone thinks they have it and they're willing to buy something to sort it....Anyway - Sarah Warren. She was a ballet dancer and having done all the things to herself that ballet dancers do her body was a bit broken so she set out to fix it again. She has a website The Somatic Movement Centre where she offers information and a series of courses of somatic movements which are designed to unravel the habitual patterns of tension we all carry in our bodies. Her work is an off-shoot of the work of Thomas Hanna who in turn developed his work from The Feldenkrais bodywork developed by Moshe Feldenkrais. I started doing Feldenkrais exercises in 2018 last time I had a longer term injury and found the exercises extremely relaxing but also very surprising how they could iron-out sore bits in your body without it really being apparent how. There are two very good websites with screeds of free Feldenkrais Lessons at The Feldenkrais Project and at Feldenkrais Access Anyway, it wasn't such a giant leap for me from there to think about what Sarah was saying. What she says in her book is that we all unconsciously hold tension in our bodies - different people have different problems. Our brains are designed to pay attention to novelty (because that has the greatest survival value) so if we start holding ourselves in a funny way - with any habitual thing we do like sitting at a computer or standing at work or whatever; our bodies will protest at first but if we persist with doing the same thing, it will stop the pain signals. At this point we have a muscle or muscles under perpetual tension but we have effectively lost control of the muscle - we can't relax it, because we can't feel it. She says that stretching can work in a temporary way - but ultimately isn't the answer because really you're fighting yourself. Dead peoples' muscles don't hold tension - so you never need to stretch a muscle, you need to let go of the tension. In order to do this we have to first regain our awareness of the muscle under tension. The way to do this is to tighten the muscle consciously and then very, very slowly release the tension whilst paying attention. In this way our motor cortex relearns how to use the muscle in a nuanced way.
But you have to do it systematically and slowly. I bought her basic course a couple of days before I broke my bastard ribs, so I couldn't get started immediately - but I did want to see what would happen if I went through the whole series of exercises. Because I had to put the whole thing on the back burner for a couple of months I am just getting to the leg exercises now. The main emphasis of the whole first course was on the core muscles. I tried some of them in the early days of ribs-gate but using my abs pulled on my ribs and it was all hopeless. Anyway - I'm well into it now and really enjoying it. If nothing else the daily lessons are again really relaxing. I know I'm not exactly a poster child for good posture or function - but I have a kind of belief I'm going to get somewhere with it.
As I said I'm just getting into the leg muscles now and it's going to take a bit of work. Whereas most of my muscles in my upper half have some degree of nuance, my poor hamstrings which are tight as...I don't know what...and the left one tighter than the right, and probably responsible ultimately for the slew of injuries I've just been weathering...well I can hardly feel them - which in a way is a good thing, because if I can recover the feeling in them well maybe I can relax them at last. I was doing the glute one today for the first time. I'm lying on the floor following her instructions, she's saying 'do this do that do this, now feel the tension in your glute...' nope, nothing, nada, well maybe....but it does come if you keep doing it every day.
So that...is the whole story :-). I don't know why Peter won't listen to me. I'm fascinating.
