The back of a 50 year old?!

Monday, August 13th

5:00 PM - 6 Miles - 40 min
Nice comfortable run along the Mystic River path and up towards sandy beach.

So I went to a chiropractor for the first time in my life on Friday for a free trial my teammates had told me about. Even though I haven't had any noticeable problems, I figured it wouldn't hurt to get checked out and have some x-rays taken to see if there were any problems that I didn't know about or things that I could adjust to help my running. The first day was mostly introductory stuff and talking about general health issues. I then went back this morning to actually go over the x-rays and determine if I needed any adjustments. While going over the x-rays, they told me that my hips were properly balanced which meant the orthodic I use was making the right compensations for my shorter leg. However, they then went on to tell me that my back was mis-aligned and my head alignment was 3cm in front of where it should be. This apparently has been putting a lot of pressure on the curvature of my back and has compressed several of the discs. They actually compared the wear on my vertebrae to that of a 50 year old man! This was a little discomforting to hear and certainly wasn't the clean bail of health that I was expecting to hear. So they did some "adjustments" on me, cracking, crunching, and snapping all sorts of things. We scheduled 2 more visits for this week, after which, we'll determine if long term corrections are necessary. Even though I wasn't thrilled about the diagnosis, I'm glad that I'm looking into this and making sure I leave no stone unturned when trying to improve my overall performance.

I had a nice long conversation yesterday afternoon with a close friend of mine and while walking along the Charles River, we talked about all sorts of things as usual. At one point in the conversation, we had been talking about all the injuries and problems we've had and she said something that kind of stood out to me... she said, "do you ever wonder if all these problems you've had are trying to tell you something?" I know she didn't mean that I should quit running or anything that drastic but it was certainly something that got me thinking the rest of the evening. I know that I don't have the perfect stride or perfect running build or an olympic gene pool so I know that I have my limitations in this sport. I look at people like Dathan Ritzenhein or Alan Culpepper and know that I'll never have the build or stride that they do. But I also know that they've had many imperfections and obstacles along the way as well. I'm not going to just give up on my dreams because of a few imperfections. I won't let any physician or therapist or even my own body tell me when I should give up on this thing that I love. That's a decision only I can make. And I'll assure you that I'm not quitting on this thing anytime soon. I've seen people get through so much more than I've dealt with and become more successful than I could even fathom. So now if I hear someone ask, "do you think your body is trying to tell you something?", I'll simply answer, "Yes, It's telling me this isn't gonna be easy." ...but then again nothing great ever comes easy.