Stretch, stretch, stretch

As both an athlete and a coach I’ve had a complicated relationship with stretching over the years. I’ve never been flexible. In the kindergarten circle, I was the one kid who couldn’t sit Indian-style and had to sit either on my knees or in an awkward approximation of Indian-style with my knees pointed stubbornly in the air.

The only stretching I did as an athlete in high school and college was the brief tensing that feels really good on sore muscles the day after a hard workout. My high school coach never emphasized it and I had a fair amount of success, so I always just considered it rather pointless. In college, I wore it as a small point of pride which especially baffled my female teammates who saw stretching as an essential part of their training.

I was always fairly healthy, but definitely did not have a perfect record. I never missed a race in high school and had just a few weird pains here in there. In college, however, I missed all but the first race of my sophomore outdoor season with patellar tendonitis. I attributed it to overtraining beginning with that years cross country season. I still believe that’s accurate, but not once did I consider that stretching might help alleviate the problem.

I didn’t miss any races during my junior or senior year and managed to run my best times during those years. My knees were always ridiculously tight and took forever to warm up. If we would go on an 8-mile training run in the country, then ride in the van 20 minutes back to campus, it took me multiple 200’s to get back moving again. I literally could not break 45 seconds on the first few because my knees wouldn’t flex. My pre-race jogs started off slow and stiff before finally loosening up enough to run my race.

Since college, I’ve gone through various periods of training and not training, usually tied to the particular athletes I’m coaching at the time. I took a nearly five year hiatus from racing after the 2010 Turkey Trot in Wichita. I had struggled off and on with a pain in the side of my knee (not the front like I had in college) and wasn’t motivated to race if I knew I couldn’t run the times I was hoping for. Sometimes I could run 8 miles pain free, other times it hurt after 3 miles. It was frustrating in its randomness. I had no real races to train for, so I ran with my teams when I could, but wouldn’t say I was training.

Everything I felt about stretching was reenforced by hearing things like increased flexibility not correlating to improved performance or how it’s pointless and possibly detrimental to static stretch for flexibility before intense exercise. I learned stretching had a role to aid recovery post-exercise, but that wasn’t enough for me to ever emphasize it.

When I was asked this spring to run the 5K leg of a team triathlon in August I said yes immediately to motivate me to find a way to get back out there, also trusting that I could deal with a 5K before any pain got too bad. I diagnosed my knee pain as an IT band issue as it runs along the outside of the leg from the hip to the knee. I found the stretches that were supposed to treat this issue and started doing them religiously after each run while wearing knee straps on longer runs. After just six weeks, I ditched the straps and was running pain free every time. Praise the stretching gods, it worked!

I was excited to be back into it and pleased with running an 18:22 all alone after modest training. I next set my sites on the August 2016 Pikes Peak half marathon. It’s a race I’ve heard of forever, but it never really interested me. I just thought it was a gradually-uphill road race. When I learned it was nothing that pedestrian–that it’s basically a timed hike where the winner averages slower than 10 minute a mile–that’s when I decided I wanted to run it! It’s not a road race, it’s a 13 mile trail challenge. To enter, I need to get a qualifying half in before the March entry deadline. So I’m entered in a half in January in San Diego where I can run with my college teammate, Matt Dicks. I set out confidently to train feeling great after my August 5K.

At the end of September, however, I rolled my ankle and have suffered setback after setback since. I believe in my overzealousness to get back moving, I overstress my calves which pulled on my arches and gave me plantar fasciitis. I didn’t know what to do until I called myself an idiot again and found the stretches needed to deal with it. Along with some arch supports, stretching saved my butt again. Now I have what is, hopefully, a mild calf strain.

So here I am at the beginning of December, a life-long non-stretcher, with a long-run this fall of just 5 miles, hoping stretching can save me enough to complete a half marathon on January 17.

Stretching gods, my fate is in your hands.