First, I’ll tell you how it ended: 2:00:37. I wanted to break two hours. My previous best half marathon was 2:04 and I’ve been getting faster and doing CrossFit and CFE. I had fancy racing flats on. I was trying to stick with POSE. The first 8 miles were easy. I started around the average pace for the 2:04 and went faster after mile two. Where oh where did I go wrong?
The serious problems really began in mile 9 with foot pain. Too much pounding on the racing flats, I thought. They might be a little too new to race in. I dialed it back a little knowing I was pretty close anyway. My tempo slowed. By mile 12, my calves were spasming. I spent the last mile trying to sprint to beat the 2 hour mark, knowing I wouldn’t make it, and slowing to fight off the spasms.
I’ll tell you how it ends again: when I took off my right shoe to figure out the foot pain, I thought I had a stress fracture on the inside edge, by the ball. Once it became clear that it wasn’t a stress fracture, the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
I had tied my fancy shoes too tightly in the front.
In the POSE form, you land on the forefoot and pull your leg straight up from there to try to make a figure 4. Your foot lands behind your center of mass. A forward lean propels you. Muscle elasticity keeps you efficiently coming of the ground and moving forward as long as you’re going at a fast enough tempo.
But if your foot hurts, you’ll change that form on one leg. You might heel strike or switch the way your leg pulls up and falls, bringing your calves — the most useless muscles in the leg during a run– into play. Your calves will then punish you for using them. Your slower tempo will keep you from coming off the ground with muscle elasticity and you’ll pound away at the road. And you’ll end up like me, fighting a hurt foot and muscle spasms through the end of the race.
I’m glad it wasn’t a marathon, it would have been tough to finish. It will take more testing to see if I can even keep these shoes. Are my toenails coming off because I tied them tightly and pulled the side of the shoe over? 5Ks, 10Ks and Half marathons are constant gear tests for the next race: Did the nutrition work? Does this shoe work for my form? Do I have any skin left under this pair of shorts? The longer runs are the time to learn those things and apply them. You can do shorter distances in chucks and jeans and it won’t matter much. The longer races or training runs test out everything.
The one thing that bothered me was why my quads hurt on Monday. POSE uses the hamstrings, right? I seem to be using quads and hips. So, I asked a more experienced runner about this and it was then that I learned that I had been paying too much attention to what now seems to be the worst advice in POSE running: the throw away line that tells you that the figure 4 involves pulling the foot up under your ass using your hamstrings. When that foot comes up and the leg is pushed forward, you’re not using the hamstrings correctly. If the foot is right by the opposite knee, you’re using your hips. You can feel it happen: put your hand on your hip as if it’s in your pocket, do the pull and you’ll feel your hip flexor pull the leg forward and the lower quad do extra work.
The pull is really the lower leg coming straight up to that point under you, not the foot. The foot has to be a little further back. The bar of the 4 crosses the knee. Again, hand in the pocket and pull the lower leg straight up instead of the foot with the hamstrings. You won’t feel the hip work.
I’ve basically tried to learn to run correctly, but I’m doing it all wrong. It’ll take some time and form work, but it will hopefully pay off.