Last fall, I volunteered as a mentor for the Fit-tastic walk-to-run program sponsored by The Athlete’s Foot in Raleigh’s Cameron Village. It was the same program that had resuscitated my running career a year earlier (and the one I had written about a year before that while still at The News & Observer). Mentoring, I figured, was the least I could do for a program that had helped reunite me with a love lost for more than 20 years.
Tag Archives: Fit-tastic
Coach
“That first 200 was pretty good,” Tim said as he followed me on his bike, “but you need to pick it up for the last 400.”
Right, I gasped to myself. And you can pick up my lung when I cough it up.
It was my first “coached” running workout and a whirlwind of thoughts rushed through my oxygen-deprived brain as I did the third of my four prescribed 600-meter sprints (bookended by a pair of 1,000-meter dashes). Will I be seeing that tuna wrap I had for lunch again? was foremost. Why am I doing this? was a close second. By “this,” I meant hiring, at age 54, a coach to drive me, push me and to make my body feel like it hadn’t since I’d last crossed paths with a coach in high school some 35 years ago.
If you can walk, you can run
I wrote the following for the Charlotte Observer, where it appeared on March 23, and in Raleigh’s The News & Observer, where it ran March 30.
For the first 37 years of her life, becoming a die-hard runner wasn’t on Carol Gore’s bucket list.
Walk, don’t run
“Squeeze your butt and take full steps,” Kpop (a k a Karley Poplestein), 02 Fitness trainer by day/walking coach by early evening instructed as we began walking from The Athlete’s Foot in Cameron Village to the nearby Rose Garden. That’s a … curious request, I thought. Fortunately, before I could reach behind and grab my buns while taking full steps I noticed my cowalkers were clinching their gluteus maximus, not palming them.
Hamstrung: The recovery
Finally, the exciting conclusion to our hamstring injury! (Guilty of hyperbole. Let’s proceed.)
OK, a hamstring injury isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t have the cache of, say, an ACL injury. But it’s common among weekend warriors. Don’t warm up, go out too fast — ping! — there’s a debilitating snap in the back of your leg. A muscle snap that if you ignore can hobble you for weeks. First, a look at how to avoid irritating your hamstring in the first place.