Whether Running Or Blogging If Things Don’t Improve Change Something

A Definition of Insanity:

“Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.“

Albert Einstein (attributed), US (German-born) physicist (1879 – 1955) From: The Quotations Page.

Hi folks,

Remember the Pareto Principle, so much admired, and rightly so, by Tim Ferriss, author of that great book, ‘The Four Hour Workweek?’ Well, I suspect that it is true of strain placed on the muscles we use for running and the factors that control blogging traffic. For instance, I have no problem finding blogging ideas about safe exercise for better health, and I generally post a short article every day, but about 50% of my traffic comes from four posts, which represents 1% of my blogging work. Here is the recent WordPress output supporting this observation.

There are two main drivers for human activity, including Google searches, those being to find pleasure or avoid pain. Interestingly, of my four most popular posts, two are about finding enjoyment in life and two are about avoiding pain. Here is an example of something that gave me pleasure in the kitchen today, and because it did so I couldn’t resist doing it over and over again, making the video below, and irritating Deb who had just come off of a 12-hour night shift and wanted to go to sleep.

The other side of the coin, avoiding pain, is a critical one for running skills. I recently wrote a post about my delight that Rebecca’s Continuum lessons have so much improved my running. I think that the measure of a good run is not the run itself, which is great, but what your body has to say the following morning. This is the time to really assess your running technique.

My chronic running-associated problems have included severe knee pain and damage, tight calves, and sore feet and IT bands.  Problem number one, the severe knee problems, was finally fixed by my Feldenkrais instructor, Karen (thank you, Karen), but my minor running troubles remained, until recently. Along comes Continuum as a present from my partner, Deb, which finally enabled me to enjoy dancing. More recently my Continuum work has focused on Ironman training. Rebecca taught me first to run from my center, and in the latest lesson she showed me how to center myself through my tongue (with more weird noises) as it links to my diaphragm (when you were an embryo in your mother’s womb, your tongue and diaphragm developed from the same mass of muscle – how about them apples), and how to ‘run from my kidney region,’ where the major hip flexors (psoas muscles) are attached right at my (you guessed it) diaphragm.

Following that lesson, I had the best run yet, my legs felt longer, there was no pain in my feet, and the next day the stresses in my body had clearly been less severe, and they involved only the connective tissue (fascia) around my knees and my shin muscles (tibialis anterior). These post-run feelings were confined to those of mild, healthy stress. This was the best post-run feeling ever, yet!!! This process appeared to shift the load away from the 20% I was over-working, to distribute the work more evenly and healthily over the rest of my body. So, FitOldDog’s advice is that if things don’t improve despite your best efforts, change something.

Now that I seem to be on track to improve my joy of running, the time has come to fix my ‘blogging traffic,’ which has become mired around the 100+/day mark.

Watch this space!

-k @FitOldDog