Challenging week ahead

Sunday, June 29, 2014 · Mike Davis

Good morning, grab your favorite cup and fill with coffee and join me while I sip on a cup of blueberry joe. We are back in Dover after a great week down on the Cape with some wonderful friends. Now it is time to get back to the world of No Finish Line Running business and what a business it is! This week we have a couple more consultations mixed in with a bunch of individual client workouts. We also have to deal with some client injuries that are frustrating to both us and our clients equally. No doubt our clients think their frustrations are far greater, but I can assure you that we take injuries to our clients personally. When we set up personal training plans we have many goals in mind, with the number one priority being to keep our runners healthy. Being able to run healthy should be the foundation of every runner and yet we runners often put other priorities ahead of this. My experience with runners of all levels as well as myself has proven to me that while we all want to run healthy, we also want to do, what we want to do. All to often our goals to run a particular distance, a certain pace, multiple races or to just keep running, overcome our healthy running logic. Instead we take that attitude that feeling some pain is part of being a runner or in my case part of getting older. Both thoughts are not correct as will as unwise to view as such. Our bodies are well put together machines that come complete with indicator sensors that let us know that something is right or wrong. We love the right signals such as hitting a PR, be we often ignore the sensors that tell us something is wrong such as extended soreness or even mild pain. Instead we view those indicators as part of "being a runner". As runners we typically fall into the here and now, with any thoughts of our future running being left for another day. As long as we can get through this running season, we are quite happy or even just get to that next finish line. Of course NFLR is founded on taking the focus away from the finish line and putting it on the joy of running and a huge part of that is maintaining long term running health. Because NFLR is not strictly a results oriented running business we often have to look out for our runners even when they don't necessarily like our approach. We certainly understand our runners all have various goals and we put endless hours designing the best way to help our runners achieve them, but we also have to pay attention to those sensors that indicate certain issues to us. Often all of us runners ignore the indictors or at least tell ourselves that we will get through for now and deal with the issues later. At NFLR we have many resources to help our runners run healthy such as the Medical Motion gait analysis system. Being able to have a professional gait analysis done and reviewed by experienced coaches is invaluable when it comes to injuries or more importantly injury prevention. Understanding how we run and then looking at the cause and effect help us to correct weaknesses or improve overall efficiencies. From arm swing to foot strike it all matters and most of us have no idea how we actually run. When we brought Gait analysis to New Hampshire we had one goal and that was to: "help runners". We have done many gait analysis and every one has been great in that we have detected at least one detail that has given the runners a way to improve their running. We also understand the importance of a personalized training plan and instilling detail right down to a specific pace and while this can be frustrating for our runners we are typically unbending. Knowing what is best is our job as well as helping our runners to understand what's best for them. So this week is going to be a challenge as we meet new potential clients, work with our current clients and determine how to help some of our runners get healthy! Lot's of fun. Have a great Sunday and an even better week! Mike