The four main components of the ChiRunning form are posture, lean, heel lift and arm swing. This blog entry discusses posture.

Within the ChiRunning technique your aligned posture is the foundation upon which everything else is built. When I focus on the components of the ChiRunning technique during a run, I always start with my posture and will not move on to any other component until I am certain my posture is aligned. If my posture is out of alignment (and regardless of how I implement the other components) I will simply not achieve the desired results. I constantly tell myself “If my posture is out of alignment I can’t ChiRun”. I learned this the hard way through a number of runs where the proper alignment of my posture was not adequately emphasized and I wasted my time trying to get everything else working.

You align your posture so that when viewed from the side you can visualize a straight line through your shoulders, hips and ankles. When viewed from the front or back you can visualize a straight line creating a central axis running down from the top of your head to the middle of your feet.

This central axis can be thought of as a needle that runs vertically through a cotton ball. The needle is the postural alignment of your neck, spine, hips and legs. When you align your posture, all you do is move the neck, spine, hips and legs in place and without using muscle energy to hold it there. When you are in alignment everything else around the needle is the cotton and should be soft and relaxed, especially when you run.

When you align your posture you deal with your body in three separate sections. The lower body – which is everything from the hips down. The pelvis, and lastly the upper body which is everything above the pelvis to the top of your head.

You align your posture in four separate steps. First you align your lower body by aligning your legs and feet. Then you align your upper body by lengthening your spine and straightening your neck. Then you align the pelvis with the upper body by levelling the pelvis. At this point, the body is two separate straight sections and hinged at the hips. The last step is to bring those two separate parts in alignment with each other. Detailed instructions and exercises on how to align your posture are provided within the ChiRunning book, video DVDs and audio CDs.

“One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.”
Oscar Wilde

VICKY: And the winners of the first week of the contest are….

GRANT: To be announced during this blog?

VICKY: Of course. We want our readers to actually read the blog and not skip ahead to see who won the beautiful iRun T-Shirts.

GRANT: You seem to be in a better mood. Wow, were you ever in the dumps today.  Exhausted from the long weekend?

VICKY: I ran a 16K long run yesterday with my BF on beautiful Beach Boulevard that runs along Lake Ontario from Hamilton to Burlington. By the way, might I add that Burlington, Ontario is #3 on Money Sense’s list of Canada’s best places to live. Along the way, we also stopped to watch the fascinating Burlington Canal Lift Bridge in action as this massive cargo ship from Quebec sailed into the Hamilton Port. It was just an amazing run and I didn’t want to drive back to Ottawa after that. But that’s not it, that’s not why I’m in the dumps today.  I think I’ve got the reading blues.

GRANT: What is that?

VICKY: Well, you know what happens after running a race? Many runners get the running blues and they just can’t bring themselves to run again for a while?  I get that after I’ve read a book.  All the emotional energy just gets sucked out.  At the end of it all the last thing you want to do is pick up another book.

GRANT: What are you saying?  You haven’t finished PRE yet?  I lent you my copy 2 weeks ago.

VICKY: No (sigh).  I’m only in the first chapter.  So far it’s really interesting but I just can’t get into reading any books at all.  I mean for the goodness sake I can’t even bring myself to read my vampire romance novels!!

GRANT: Holy Crow Batman!  You have to start reading again.  Listen, I have already finished Running With The Buffaloes and am part way through Bowerman and the Men of Oregon.

VICKY: Yeah but you’re a reading machine. I even took your advice and cancelled my cable so I wouldn’t have any excuses. Anyways, I’m failing miserably but don’t worry, I’ll get back on the reading wagon. So those books you’re reading, what are they about?

GRANT: Well, before I answer that I would like to announce that Regan has won our first T-Shirt! Regan wins because she is our first official fan and member of the book club.  She comments all the time.  The rest of you could learn a lesson from her!  Now to answer your question, Running With the Buffaloes follows the University of Colorado’s 1998 men’s cross country team.  There are so many parallels to PRE.  They even watch the movie “Without Limits” about Prefontaine during the book.  Tragically they also experience the death of one of the athletes during the year.  It is a very unique look inside the training habits and tribulations of a university running team.    Now I’m on to Bowerman.

VICKY: Cool.  Well you’re clearly not experiencing the reading blues.

GRANT: Definetly not.  In fact it was a challenge to get on here and work on the blog.  So much reading to do.  I love to sit in my sunroom and relax with a book.  Paradise.

VICKY: Ok Mr. I have an awesome fantastic sunroom/perfect reading area, let’s not rub it in. And with that let’s announce the second winner…. (drum roll please)…. Sylvie!  Because lets face it, if you read the previous blog you’ll know she needs a shirt. Watch out for those hydrants Sylvie 🙂

GRANT: Congrats to all our entrants.  Still one more shirt to be given away this week.  And more items to come.  Just leave a comment below!

VICKY: For example, tell us your experiences in cross country running.  Did you run in high school or university?  Or just tell us why you need a shirt.

GRANT: Yeah, I liked Arlene’s story.  She almost won.

This past Sunday was my last ‘long’ long run before the Ottawa Half-Marathon. Which means race day is now less than two weeks away. Which means that, training-wise, there is absolutely nothing I can do to improve my performance between now and race day, and absolutely everything I can do to screw it up.

And screw it up I have, at least prior to previous ‘big’ races in my life. Like that time I thought I pulled my groin doing speedwork while I was tapering for a Boston-qualifying attempt, but it turned out that I had given myself a pelvic stress fracture. (Of course, I didn’t realize that until I had run the race with a fractured pelvis, silly rabbit. Suffice it to say, I didn’t make it to Boston – just the water-running lane at my local pool.) Or that time I stayed out a little too late dancing the week before my first-ever marathon, got coughed on by some random dude, and wound up with a full-blown chest cold a few days before the race. Or that time I ate my own body weight in sushi the night before trying to set a 10k PB, and had to suffer through 47 minutes worth of spicy tuna burps in addition to the screaming cardiovascular and muscle pain that goes along with trying to set a 10k PB. You get the idea. I’m not the smartest sometimes.

Of course, my life has changed considerably since those self-inflicted pre-race mishaps, and as the days tick down to May 3oth, I’ve got my eye on the adorable, little 15-pound saboteur in my house as the likeliest source of pre-race calamity. In my last blog post I described the sleep-deprivation injuries already sustained during this training cycle, and if I’ve come to know my daughter at all in the last four months, I figure she’ll pull out all the stops to make sure Mom shows up at the start line so bleary-eyed, I might actually start running in the wrong direction once the horn sounds.

Then again, if anyone’s taught me the true meaning of endurance in the past few months, it’s my baby girl. From a 15-hour labour (with my husband calling out metaphorical kilometre markers with each contraction), to marathon nursing sessions (to give you some context, we watched all five seasons of Battlestar Gallactica by the time she was 8 weeks old), to strength-building rocking and shushing sessions at 3am, to super-sprints up the stairs to the nursery after catastrophic diaper malfunction, little Alex has taught me that, just when I think I’ve hit my final gear and have to grind to a halt, I can actually dig a bit deeper and keep going.  (Thankfully, all it takes is a smile or a giggle from my girl to remind me – it’s totally worth it!) As our soon-to-be cover girl and Yummy Mummy Club founder Erica Ehm so eloquently put it when I interviewed her last week, “motherhood is a frickin’ marathon…Except that there is no finish line in motherhood – you just have to keep going and going and going!”

Amen, sister.  And somewhere around the 17k mark of my half-marathon, I plan to remember those words.  It should be right around the time I see my husband and daughter cheering me from the sidelines, plant a big, sweaty kiss on ’em, and find those extra gears for a mean finishing kick. Assuming I don’t eat too much sushi the night before.

ChiRunning is a running form with two primary merits – energy efficiency and injury prevention.  The technical aspects of the running form that allow you to achieve these merits involve alignment and relaxation.

You align you posture, everything else around it including your arms, legs and feet are soft and relaxed when you run.

You align your posture so that your body weight is supported by your bones, ligaments and tendons (i.e., your skeletal system) instead of your muscles – which can relax.

You align your posture and lean it forward from the ankles to engage the pull of gravity to propel you forward – so the muscles in your legs and feet can relax.

Relaxed muscles are more energy efficient than working muscles and relaxed muscles can’t be fatigued and injured through overuse.

In ChiRunning you also align your posture so that as many parts as possible move in the direction of travel to maximize energy efficiency and you also move these body parts in the manner in which they were designed to prevent injury.

ChiRunning focuses on cooperating with the forces experienced during running by being relaxed and aligned with those forces.  There are two main forces, the force of gravity pulling you down and the force of the road coming at you as it meets your feet.  In ChiRunning you cooperate with the force of gravity by leaning forward and allowing gravity to pull you.  You also cooperate with the force of the road by leaning your posture so that your feet contact the ground underneath or slightly behind your hips and move to the rear in the same direction as the force. If your feet make contact with the ground in front of your hips then they meet the force of the road head on causing an impact, which can result in injury.  Also if your feet contact the ground in front of your hips, this may cause a momentary braking action each time your foot contacts the ground – which is not energy efficient.

So if you stood up right now, and aligned your posture, completely relaxed all the muscles in your legs, especially everything from the knees down and leaned forward from your ankles ever so slightly, your body will start to fall forward and down.  Instinctively you will pick up one of your feet and place it on the ground a foot or two forward to keep you from falling on your face.  Congratulations this may have been your first ChiRunning step!

What if instead of putting that foot down and coming to a halt, you just put it down momentarily and started the forward fall again and then used your other foot for momentary support.  Now you are moving forward in a controlled fall from one foot to the other.  You use gravity not the muscles in your legs and feet to move you forward.  The more relaxed you can make those muscles, the less resistance to the forward pull of gravity and the faster you can go.

The four main components of the ChiRunning form are posture, lean, heel lift and arm swing.  These components will be discussed in upcoming blogs.

Daniel Njenga outlasted Philip Rotich to win Sunday’s Mississauga Marathon in 2:20:36. The two were virtually side-by-side at both the halfway and 38km points, but as both faded slightly over the final kilometres, Rotich yielded a 29 second triumph to the winner of the 2008 Toronto Marathon.

On the women’s side, Allison Hobeika hung on for a 3:08:46 win. Cambridge’s Julie Cummings was second and Daniela Fiumara third.

Jhon Quispe Sanchez won the half marathon in 1:08:45, followed by David Kipsang. Kipsang also finished fourth in the previous night’s 10K event. Mississauga’s own Steve Koziarski was third. Ottawa’s Mary Davies continued her remarkable spring season with a 1:14:04 win. She won the Sporting Life 10K two weeks ago, and the 21km de Montreal on April 18. Lucy Njeri Muhami was second, following her win in Saturday night’s 10K. Canadian marathon veteran Nicole Stevenson was third in 1:17:11.

Congratulations to everyone who crossed the line in the weekend’s marathon, half marathon, 10K, 5K and 2K races!

Ever been a little short on time but need to pop in a quick, specific workout?

So Thursday evening I had some plans and there was about an hour and a half to get in a real good workout (I’m cramming for race weekend) after work.  I said to my boss/coach I want to run under 32:00 for 10k, hit me with a workout!  I love the creativity of his workouts and he thought for about a second and said ok I got one, whipped out the calculator and came up with this:

4 x (1k @ 3:10 m/k, 1k @ 3:30 m/k)

So that’s back to back 1 kms at that specific pace, rest after the first set 1 minute at 4:oo m/k, after second set 45 seconds at 4:00 m/k and then 30 seconds at 4:00 m/k for the final ‘rest’.  If your thinking that must have felt harder and harder all the way through…it did.

Now the major problem I encountered was that at that speed and with a 1% grade the treadmill starts to do a funny thing.  The entire machine walked about 10 feet across the room and I had to jump off during the rest and wheel it back to the other side of the room!  Ridiculous right?!  It was nice to have that on my mind though because it certainly helps you forget the hurt of the workout.

Anyway workout completed and one step closer to my goal, 2 weeks today!  Hope everyone’s training is going great.