Runwithpower is thrilled to welcome Cindy to our training staff

As the newest member of the RunwithPower team it is fitting that I introduce myself and provide a brief personal history so you, the reader, have an understanding of who I am and the experiences I have encountered as they will surely influence my future posts on RunwithPower.com. My name is Cindy, a recent college grad; I spent my undergraduate years studying Health and Human Performance. Studying HHP seemed to be an obvious field of study as the years leading up to college were filled with a unique fascination for sports, injuries and rehabilitation.

There were early signs that I may be athletically inclined, I was crawling by 6 months and mastered walking before 9 months. Some of my earliest memories are of “shooting hoops” in my basement with my dad and brother. I participated in all of the traditional childhood team sports, but always had more of a passion for basketball. I continued to play multiple sports throughout Jr. High and High School, trying new sports as they became available (i.e. track in Jr. High).

I was fortunate to escape injury until basketball season my sophomore year when the floodgates opened. The first injury incurred was the “unhappy triad” I tore the ACL, MCL and Meniscus in my left knee as a result of a jump stop gone wrong. Out of respect for your time I’ll give you a quick synopsis of the remainder of my basketball career: Jr. year, torn left ACL. Sr. year, torn right ACL. At this point I did not feel like my career should be over so I thought I would give college ball a try. I tore the ACL in my right knee within minutes of the first open gym I attended.

I was not going to let my athletic career come to an end one week into college. I had previously considered trying to participate in both basketball and track, when I finally accepted the fact that basketball just was not going to work out I became that much more determined to make track—long jump specifically, “my sport” and that it has become. With a personal goal yet to be satisfied my track career is still very much alive, and there are high hopes for this season!

It was because of my knee injuries that I was introduced to the training system RunwithPower.com is dedicated to sharing with you. I have had the opportunity to practice efficiency training for over 7 years. Until recently I have just been a participant, however, I am now taking on an additional role one responsible for showing, teaching, and sharing with others how efficiency training can impact athletic performance and even day to day lives.

I look forward to sharing more about philosophy and training as my understanding continues to grow. While the educational topics are the focus of RunwithPower.com, we provide our personal stories so our readers can connect and share in our experiences. To this effect I included my basketball injuries to provide hope and motivation to those who are experiencing similar circumstances. If you experience an injury, know that with hard work and determination you can bounce back…plus you never know what unexpected benefits may result from your injury!

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For the fifth summer in a row, Trinity Sports has hosted its July training camp, a 4 hour per day, 5 day per week, 4-week sports conditioning camp. There really is nothing like getting up at 8 in the morning and for 4 grueling hours, pushing your body to the absolute limit. Camp was a huge success this year. Each year more and more middle and high school athletes are hearing about Trinity Camp and making it a major part of their summer conditioning. We hit the 100-camper mark for the first time this year, an impressive number given no advertisement other than word of mouth.

There were a number of changes to this year’s camp that made it unique in comparison to the previous years. For one, we came up with an official Trinity logo, which makes the t-shirts look very professional and much more recognizable. The addition of Cindy Walsh to not only the Trinity trainer crew but also the Runwithpower crew brings Trinity its first female representative, which was great for the female athletes in camp. Continue to check Runwithpower for posts by Cindy, as she will be talking about her training experience and her athletic career.

The biggest change to camp was the focus on sport specificity in the second session. The first session of camp is the first 2 hours of each day, where the training consists of high levels of muscular demand to increase range of motion and efficiency in the athlete’s structural joints, particularly the hips, taking their athleticism to a whole new level. The second session in the past was all about strength. The campers would spend a great deal of time lifting as well as doing dynamic strengthening. This year, however, we split the campers into their individual sports for the second session and they would spend time doing strength focused on their sport’s demands, as well as doing skill training in their sport. We had soccer, basketball, volleyball, football, track and cross-country, and baseball. The addition of the sports specific session helped out tremendously as the athletes began to integrate their training into their sport.

Finally, the first session of camp was much more focused on quality of training rather than quantity. We traditionally spent the first week and a half doing what we call a “tear-down”, where the athlete’s body becomes significantly fatigued and stressed as the extreme levels of demand take their toll on their muscular system and break through any inefficient muscular patterns that may be limiting their performance. What this normally does is it causes the athlete to relearn how to move in those fundamental ways with greater efficiency of movement. The rest of camp, then, is to rebuild the athlete with their new muscular patterns. This year, we did not do a tear-down. The reason for this was, many of the campers were in the middle of summer league competition, and when you do a tear-down, the athletes performance may temporarily suffer until they are able to train for a few weeks with their new muscular patterns. Instead of tearing down by doing heavy demand, we made the workouts not quite as intense at first, but really emphasized proper form on every single exercise to get the greatest benefit without breaking down the body. In the end, we liked the tear-down from the previous years, but again the new style helped the summer athletes to be able to perform well in competition during camp, and it also contributed to them being able to develop their sport specific skills during the second session.

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Three miles into the experience of a lifetime the pressure in my knee started to build.  Feelings of panic gripped me, was I going to come all this way just to not finish?  No way!!  I decided it was all or nothing, if I was going to have to stop then i was going to make it as far as I could first.  Time to ramp up the pace!  I picked a runner up in front of me and ran right on his hip.  Together we weaved in and out of hundreds, maybe even thousands of runners.  I did my best to ignore the now extreme discomfort I was feeling in my knee.  Seeing the half way point did wonders, boosting my determination and focus.

Cruising along in the later stages of the race

I crossed at 1:27 which was better than I could had dreamed going into the race with all the weight and fear of injury.  From there on out it was one mile at a time.  I kept telling myself that I would stop and stretch my IT band as soon as I saw my Dad and friend Loren, who came to Boston with me. They saw me at miles 10 and 20, but they were lost to my searching eyes, standing amongst the thousands of spectators.  So I did the only thing left to do, I kept going.  I was really struggling to keep running by mile twenty.  The lack of running over the past month and a half was starting to show as the fatigue threatened my chances of finishing.  But, at the top of heart-break hill I found new energy as hundreds of crazy screaming Boston College students urged us on! With five miles it was mostly down hill to go.

I pushed like I had never pushed before my confidence building with each mile.  Then there was only two tenths of a mile to go and I emptied what little energy I had left from the tank, finally finishing the race! I was done, I did it without stopping despite the pain and the fatigue, and that in it self felt good.  When I finally found Loren and my Dad they gave me the best news of the day. Not only had I finished, but I ran a new PR! My official time was 3 hours 8 minutes and 12 seconds!  At that moment it didn’t matter that every muscle in my body ached with soreness, and in two weeks time I would forget about any IT band problems.  I did it!  Thank you so much to everyone who supported me through the tough times and celebrated with me in my success!!

Mission Accomplished

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That Saturday I decided it was time to run, regardless of whether or not I was a hundred percent.  Sadly enough, it wasn’t the pounding headache that had me limping only 9 miles into a 12 mile run.  The run started out great, I was back where I belonged, feet seemingly floating along the pavement.  This feeling of elation turned to frustration as I felt the pressure build on the outside of my right knee.  If you have ever experienced the devastating feeling of not being able to do what you love no matter how hard you try to push through, then you will be able to relate to how i was feeling at that moment.  The IT band muscle that runs down the lateral portion of the left leg to the knee was the source of my problem.  During the week I was sick my body reacted very negatively to the lack of training and stimulus to my muscular system.

My body was so used to training using the 4 Laws that when I didn’t do any training for a week I tightened up, causing my muscular system to shift my skeletal system, ever so slightly, out of alignment.  Every time I would try to run this misalignment would cause my IT band muscle to rub against mu knee, giving me the pleasant sensation of feeling like my knee had exploded into flame!  Using the 4 Laws of training, my coach and I were able to realign my body.  The problem was that I had not developed any muscular endurance in this newly aligned position, as a result, ever time I would try to run my new stride would fatigue after a few miles, causing the all too familiar fire to return to my knee.  I became very disheartened and frustrated as the days turned to weeks and I still couldn’t run.  If it was not for the incredible prayers and support of family and friends I wouldn’t have had the motivation to keep with it.

The silver lining of the story, from a training standpoint was integration.  The one thing I was able to do to stay in shape was integrate.  So, for the next month and a half I integrated as aggressively as i could.  Integration gave my muscular system enough of the right kind of stimulus to help get my body back to where it was before the tightness settled in.  I gradually started running very short distances, with tons of integration between laps.  Before I knew it, it was time to board the flight to Boston.  I was nervous, having not run over five miles in the last 45 days leading up to race day, but there was no way I was going to miss out on this opportunity

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Following the lengthening of these muscles we would then go and place some high levels of demand on them by doing loaded moves on a series of balance beams. The purpose behind the balance beams is it forces you to create a higher level of muscular activation due to the amount of balance coupled with the normal running moves Like High Knee Walks and Lunges.

Below is a video Loren, Josh and I put together that demonstrates some of the partner stretching we did today. This was made awhile ago for our other training blog, Train2move.com

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Let’s quickly go over the basic training philosophy that is more broadly discussed in the earliest runwithpower posts. Our bodies can be compared to a building. You need a specific set of plans to follow in order to build a solid, functional building. The design of the building, or the blueprints, show us the building’s basic structural components. Well, our bodies are extremely complex in terms of the muscles, nerves, and bones that it is made of. Yet, every human has the exact same basic design or layout. Our muscles and bones form the structure of our bodies. Bones themselves are totally dependent on the proper function of muscles to maintain their alignment in the body as well as their articulation, or movement, in joints.

With that being said, it literally takes every muscle in our body doing its job in order for the body to be like the building that is built to the exact specifications of its basic blueprint. The cool thing about the body is, when it is in this state, which we know as the “anatomically correct position,” the body is able to do all the things we do, like crawl, run, jump, lunge, dash, climb, and tumble, without sustaining injury! This is Law #4 as described in our training philosophy.

So then, where do injuries come from? It comes down to our muscles and how they have the ability to change all the time, based on what they are asked to do. If you make a muscle contract or stretch, it will become better at those tasks. These are examples of stimulus. If you are not giving a muscle stimulus on a consistent enough basis though, it will become weaker, tighter, and lose its functional ability. These are Laws #1 and #2. Now, if a muscle loses its functional ability, then the position of the bones or joints it is attached to will be moved out of alignment. Other muscles will have to take over, or “compensate” for the weaker, underused muscle. You can also overtrain a specific muscle or group of muscles, in which case the bones attached to them are pulled out of their natural alignment.

The problem is, when the skeletal system gets these various misalignments, the result is a much less durable frame with which to move. Suddenly, joints begin moving and rubbing in ways they aren’t naturally designed to, and muscles are forced to move in ways they shouldn’t. The skeletal system’s ability to evenly distribute the force of pressure and impact of running in the most efficient manner is compromised. Trainers and coaches will talk about having good posture when you run, not only to increase performance, but to reduce injury. How can you you really achieve good posture if your body does not have the muscular capacity to hold the joints in their correct positions? Yes, you can think about proper body alignment all you like, but true posture is not achieved by thinking about it. It is simply the way your muscles hold your skeleton without your conscious control.

So how is it that we lose the functionality of our muscular system? It predominately comes with the fact that ever since we were little kids, we have spent most of our lives sitting, allowing our muscles to get a whole lot better at sitting and not as good at moving. The number of hours we sit every day adds up to a whole lot of muscular dysfunction around the hip joint, which is the foundation of the body! Humans were made to move, yet all we tend to do these days is sit around. Even when we go to the gym, how common is it to sit at a machine to work out? All this inactivity and lack of proper stimulus will result in a great deal of deviation from the optimal, original design of the body. The end result is, over the miles and miles of running we put in on these misaligned bodies, they wear and tear and eventually break down. Either a chronic pain begins to emerge in an over-stressed ligament or joint, or a sudden, powerful movement pushes our muscles to the point of tearing.

The next post on this subject contains the good news! You can get rid of these injuries altogether by properly training your muscular system!

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Scott Olson

So If Santa could give me a gift of running I would ask him to grant me the ability to run at my fastest speed that my body is capable of at any time. Runners often talk about that running high. That spot you can reach during runs where everything feels perfect for a time. If you have never felt this sensation, you need to because it is one of the most powerful and cleansing experiences I have ever received from working out. For me this occurs not during distance running but during those moments of feeling fast and free in my stride.

Loren Sheets – I would have to say that I wish Santa could drop a pair of slightly longer legs into my stocking. I am jealous of Usain Bolts long legs, and his huge stride. If I only had those genetics. Longer legs require greater strength and power in the muscular system, especially around the hips, to be able to move. Luckily Bolt has that power in his hips, so his long legs work to his advantage. If I could be 3 to 5 inches taller (6’3 – 6-5′), I have a feeling that I would be significantly faster if I also trained my muscular system to be powerful and efficient (which is what runwithpower is all about!) Hopefully I wake up Friday morning to find a new pair of longer legs sitting under the tree.

Josh Platt – Being able to run at top speed and having some longer legs both sound pretty cool (Especially since i’m only 5’8″) but if Santa could give me any gift to help me run I would ask for the ability to run without ever “hitting the wall” or getting tired.  This is every distance runner’s dream and can be the difference between a good runner and a great one.  The feeling of being able to speed up and blow past the competition as they are fading away and fighting their stride is a pretty amazing feeling.  I know I could have used that in the Portland Marathon for the last five miles or so!  Luckily through my training with runwithpower I will have better endurance than ever as I prepare to take on the Boston Marathon!

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