Mile 6 - The ART of Running

In the "warm up," I claimed I would "have regular contributions from marathon correspondents of all levels." You'll notice the writing is better and more to the point in these miles. Enjoy! 


This is Dan Seidel. He moonlights as a Russell Crowe look-a-like. 

Dan Seidel's Personal Bests Include: 15:40 5K, 33:33 10k, 1:12:48 Half Marathon

Below is Dan's Mile 6 "The ART of Running."


An injured runner is a danger not only to himself but to others. Friends, family, and lovers alike will feel his wrath. Like a bird flying into a window, he will try to escape his predicament by doing precisely what he shouldn’t do: continuing to run, against all self-interest and common sense. Eventually, once he has passed through the stages of denial, rage, and acceptance, he may turn to beer.

Beer

It is at this point, when all else has failed and much money has been wasted on doctors, masseuses, chiropractors, and other nostrums, that the hobbled runner may finally be ready to throw himself at the mercy of ART — active release technique, a specific combination of deep-tissue massage and movement.

Let me state my thesis boldly and clearly: ART is the most effective and quickest treatment for soft-tissue injuries caused by overuse. It is shocking to me that most distance runners have never heard of it, or wait so long until they try it, because most running injuries fall into this category. ART will not instantly heal a stress fracture; it cannot work miracles, and it doesn’t promise to. What it does address — by direct, painful pressure that will make you grit your teeth when done properly — are muscle strains, tendonitis, neuromas, plantar fasciitis, nerve impingement, and other degradations of soft tissue.

My conversion to ART came about six weeks ago. In May, I had been doing some strides on the track and my left knee buckled. Naturally I assumed I had tweaked my knee. It turned out, though, that my hamstring had given out. A nasty case of tendonitis ensued that I couldn’t shake for two months — not with rest, ice, massage, laser therapy, ultrasound, Advil, yoga, or positive thinking. I became a miserable son of a bitch, particularly since I’d just moved out to California and every day I was taunted by perfect running weather. When I started coaching high school cross country in July, I was whining about my injury to the head coach, who quickly cut me off and basically told me to shut the fuck up and go see a guy named Brian, a triathlete and ART specialist.  http://massageworx.blogspot.com/

Brian’s waiting room offered about fifteen magazines, all of them related to cycling or triathlons. A bookshelf held an impressive number of sports performance books, among which were sprinkled in works of Eastern philosophy and New Agey–themed titles. I could hear Enya softly cooing from one of the back rooms. I started squirming in my seat. But then out came Brian. I had never met a more energetic human being. The energy was not constant but erupted in intermittent spasms of laughter or just excess movement, as though he were being shocked by some remote, unseen force. He had a bottle of lotion holstered to his belt like a pistol, and without looking he would periodically squirt a small dollop into his hands and start leveraging all his considerable strength — he’d been a bodybuilder at one point in his life — into different tendons and muscles of the hamstring as he moved my leg in an arc and maintained a rapid-fire monologue involving the intricacies of the leg’s anatomy, with abbreviated anatomical Latin used as casually as a native tongue.

Now let me skip ahead for a moment, although Brian deserves his own magazine profile. I got better, and I got better quickly. A handful of sessions were enough to get me back running four or five days a week, and within a couple weeks of running and building back strength I was able to do workouts again. As a bonus, during a follow-up session with Brian he took a crack at a neuroma in my foot that had been bothering me for three years, and which forced me to wear an expensive set of custom orthotics and cost me more money than I’m willing to admit. A week ago I ditched the orthotics and my foot feels fine.

Picture of Dan Feeling Fine

All the usual caveats apply here — every person is different, everybody responds differently to treatment, not every injury will respond quickly to ART, you’ve got to find the right practitioner with the right experience, etc. But frankly, after years of pussyfooting around with conservative R.I.C.E. and with what Brian dismissively calls the “allopathy” (in a word, pill-popping) espoused by most doctors, I’ve got little patience for caveats. Just get me out the door and running, and I don’t care how much the therapy hurts or how exactly it is that it breaks up the hypoxic scar tissue so effectively. I’m sure all hobbled marathon hopefuls will agree.