Clinic Virgin No More

This past Thursday, Hubs and I went to our first clinic ever...and it wasn't all that bad.  Ha!  Just kidding, I didn't expect it to be too scary or anything...first time for anything is always the worst but this was pretty painless.  The Mindful Strides clinic started at 5:15pm, so our instructor, Marilyn Arsenault, could check in with each of us to see if we had any injuries or anything else that she should know about.  Hubs and I got there fairly early...and as the participants came in, I got more and more excited.  There was about 15 of us, Hubs being the only token male...I don't think he minded, hee hee.

I really liked Marilyn - she has a really outgoing, infectious energy and you can tell she's really enthusiastic about teaching runners.  Now this clinic is different than the usual ones that you see, in the sense that there is really very little actual running but more about body awareness.  I think the farthest that we run is maybe 50 metres or so.  Some people might think "What?  Don't you just go out and run and that's it?"  Sure, you can...but if your posture and running motion isn't optimal, think of what it's doing to your body after thousands and thousands of steps.  All that repetitive motion?  Not good.  You can maybe get away with it for shorter distances, but for longer runs...well, that's when injuries start to happen.  The first class we talked a lot about head/body positioning, core strength and stabilization, and I could feel the light bulbs going off in my little pea brain.   A lot of this stuff my physio has gone over with me so I wasn't new to it, but applying it all to running really helped connect it all together.  We even got homework!  Each of us is supposed to practice our stabilization exercises...and I gots to tells ya, it was hard.  Anyways, really looking forward to the second class, where we actually get outside and do some drills and put some of our new found knowledge to practice.  Woot!