Rollout

Man I love Luda. Rollout is one of his older songs that just never gets old for me.



This week I discovered what it means to "rollout" my hip, thanks to a trainer at my gym. I told her my hip flexor had been sore and what stretches I had been doing. She asked me if I had used the foam roller yet...and I said, "No. I saw that in my Google search but I haven't tried it." [I guess because I didn't really know what I was doing and it didn't look like it would be all that helpful.]

Ladies and gentlemen I'm here to tell you I was WRONG. The foam roller did so much more for me than the pigeon stretch and hip flexor lunges. The trainer told me to position myself as this woman is in the video, but shift my weight so that I'm targeting one hip at a time. My right hip is the one that is bothering me. She said to roll around until I felt a deep stretch of this hip then hold the stretch for 20 seconds. For the maximum stretch I should twist my upper body in the opposite direction of the hip I'm stretching. (So when I have the right hip on the roller I should twist my upper body to the left, and vice-versa.) I'm stretching both hip flexors out on the roller because it's important to stay "even."



She recommended that I roll out each hip twice before running, as well as stretch my calves, hamstrings, quads... blah, blah blah ;)

For some reason I'm anal about stretching. That's one positive impact that taking ballet in high school had on me. Warming up was really important with dance...and I carried that idea over to running. I RARELY take off on a run without stretching and walking .25 of a mile. If I'm Exhibit A, it obviously can't prevent all injuries, but if you're one of those people who takes off running without stretching at all. Please try to change that habit. Maybe if I had known about this hip rolling I could have even prevented my hip flexor soreness.

Anyway, I was kind of sore before she showed me how to use the roller. After doing it, I felt AWESOME! Like I had finally released the tension that had been there for the past few weeks. And Awesome enough to go on a two mile "run" that afternoon. Run is in quotation marks because the first mile... was something kind of like this:

Except I was fully clothed and the dog at times was pulling me. The kids I baby-sit wanted to ride their scooters on Thursday afternoon. So we decided I would run along-side them with their dog on a leash.

Really this mile was a bunch of sprints with pauses...(the dog had a couple bathroom breaks, the kids had to walk their scooters up a hill, etc.) I alternated running ahead and behind the kids on their scooters. At one point when we were going downhill the eight year old raced up behind me and the dog and was like "Hurry up! You don't want me to run into you!"

Definitely a "What is My Life?" moment. One day that's going to be me as a parent. With my kid yelling at me to run faster. I can see it now. The eight year old was not taking into account two weeks ago I was too sore to run at all...and besides the downhill, I was for the most part running faster than she could push herself on the scooter. I found it hilarious so that's all that really matters. She also made a comment when we were going up hill "How are you running? I can't even scooter up this." EXACTLY ;)

So after I was done baby-sitting I ran another mile in 9:59. That's pretty decent, I guess. And I was excited that in two days, my weekly mileage surpassed last week!