I'll Call it Progress

These last several days have been absolutely crazy.

Its mostly been due to school. I had an assignment the professor claimed would take him about 40 hours to complete. Needless to say, my Thanksgiving break wasn't much of a break. But its finally over. The cold I caught last week is done too. I'm no longer blowing twice my body weight out of my nose every day, which I think is definitely progress!

My TFL was a little sore after my monumental 1.5 mile run on Friday, so I took a couple days off. No shame in that. I'm feeling great again today and am going to go out for another run this evening after class. As long as I can keep running a little bit and recover from it, I'll be able to say I'm on the road to recovery!

I did a little thinking on my drive back to Kentucky last night about what could be causing my TFL to get sore from minimal amounts of running. The TFL is on the side of the leg, so it shouldn't be used too much for propelling me forward. As far as I understand it is mostly designed to keep things stable, but correct me if I'm wrong. Then I started thinking about what could cause me to use my TFL more, what would make it wear out so fast?

The only answer I can come up with is that I'm pushing off at an angle. If my body or leg is rotated too much, I might engage my TFL more when pushing off. On my way to class this morning I noticed my left leg was turned in slightly, so I'm making a conscious effort to undo it. I know with runners who pronate they say NOT to try and reverse the pronation, because it will only cause more damage. Is this similar, or does it somehow fall in another category?

I'm hoping I'm onto something here, but it could just be my sleep deprived brain (3 hours of sleep last night, woohoo!) telling me stories. Either way, I'm going to try concentrating on this one detail during my run tonight, and we'll see how I feel tomorrow.

Here's to progress,

-Doug