I was fortunate enough to attend a half day chirunning workshop with Larry Neumann. Added to that, I was lucky enough that we were only two students in his lesson today, so we got a nice personal training as well.

As I am still recovering from my knee injury, I decided to focus on my running form and strength issues before I start serious running again. My recovery has been mixed. I have been running two mile stretches, but my last attempt to run three days ago was aborted within a few hundred feet due to knee pain. I was bummed that I wasn’t recovering well enough for today’s workshop. At the end of it, after standing for nearly five and half hours and running 2+ miles, my knees feel really good, in spite of the fact that I did run much faster than I would liked to. I have no sore muscles, which is a huge compliment to both the ChiRunning technique and to the teacher.

Here are my initial takeaways from my first real day of ChiRunning.

Posture

This is really the first time I ever thought about posture and how it affects you during running. As Larry illustrated pretty well conceptually and proved through simple exercises, I am beginning to understand the importance of having a vertical column and a strong core. The differences were obvious when I was able to engage my core and relax my limbs and let my core do the job. I do find it a bit difficult to engage my pelvis correctly and hopefully it becomes second habit as the days go by.

Picking up the feet

The second major shift was instead of pushing my body through each step to propel myself, we learned to pick up our feet instead. When added with the lean to go forward, it is a completely different way to run. It is also completely against how one seems to run or read in other techniques of running upright, but this is something I got really comfortable even within the day. When reading the book, I was under the impression that I had to explicitly work with my hamstrings to raise my feet, which was wrong. The benefit of having an instructor was he corrected this the first time I did this and taught me how to pick up the feet the correct way.

I think that is what Carol was doing wrong as well. There is no need to kick your feet behind you as you run. The photo of Danny shows his ‘kick’ when his lean was pretty dramatic. And if done right, she should be able to relax her lower legs and the kick should have happened naturally without having to work hard at it.

Mid foot strike

Picking up the feet also helped me to land directly under my body’s center of gravity instead of ahead of it (as I used to do) and land directly on my mid-foot instead of my heels. Again, this was something I got quite comfortable really quick with a little bit of focus.

The lean

I never got the lean right when I watched the ChiRunning DVD or read the book. I think I got it wrong pretty much every time I tried it. Once in proper posture and running well, adding the lean was an amazing experience. I could really feel the acceleration and my speed go up dramatically as I increased the lean. It was fun to be able to run much faster without having to do any extra work through the muscles. Of course my lungs and heart aren’t conditioned enough to go much faster than my slow pace, but with practice and conditioning, I look forward to the day when I can enjoy my lean a lot more.

Cadence

This is the other thing that was completely new to me. As a running newbie, I was under the impression that I need to keep my cadence low for running slow and when I run fast, I pick my cadence along with my stride length. I finally understand the need to keep constant cadence and let the lean work my pace, the stride length increases automatically.

As I said initially, I am pretty happy that I was able to run 2+ miles again today without any pain :) . That itself is a great achievement for me already. I am pretty convinced right now that choosing a workshop was the best thing to do, I think it has definitely given me a head-start with understanding the basics of ChiRunning.

Regarding the instructor, Larry Neumann, I highly recommend him to anyone in the SF Bay Area who wants to do a ChiRunning workshop. In addition to being very patient and explaining the basics over and over again, he is very clear and lucid in his explanations. He has a strong grasp of bio-mechanics and explained how posture and form affect us and how specific mistakes we do cause specific injuries.

In short, I am pretty glad that I took the workshop today. Looking forward to practicing ChiRunning and run for a really long time in the future.

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