Wombly Wecognises Weirdly Wobbly Wunning

Well finally, after mentioning it after the Epsom 10k a few weeks ago, I managed to pop out with Womble to a local parky thing for her to have a look at my running 'cos she thinks I have a weird wobble. It was all interesting, and you can see a video clip of it here. It's a bit small so you probably can't see the detail!

First of all, she watched me running up and down, and noticed that I tend to run at a bit of a shuffle, rather than stretch out. I know this is true, I'm not sure if I do it when I run faster or whether it's an after-effect of all the slow paced base training. She also noticed that I tend to hold my left hand almost still, while the right hand side of my body tends to swing more. Plus if anything I tend to "lead" with my left shoulder (so running a bit sideways one). I can see all of this in the video clip, particularly towards the end.

We also did some drills - heel flicks - keeping the knee straight below the hip and flicking the feet up towards the bum - or in this case my hands. This was interesting as I could feel the left foot hit my hand square in the middle, whereas the right foot hit the outside of my hand. I looked donw (in front of course) and noticed that my right foot was distinctly turned in when it landed, rather than being nicely aligned.

The other drill was a sort of fast stepping on the forefoot, which I really found hard to do without leaning back.

Not sure what all this shows, other than I don't run very efficiently. I wonder how much energy I'm wasting if my "drive" isn't forward, but (in my right leg at least) is all over the place. If I'm sort of pushing out to the right at 10 degrees then I'm wasting an awful lot of the force as it isn't going into forward movement.

Anyway - I'm going to be aware of all this, see what I can do to improve, and mention it to the chiro next time I go!

Big thanks to Womble for doing this :oD