We
may not be elite, but we ALL need good guidance. Where do we go for
guidance and how do we know that it's good?
Nov 22, 2019
In
these past few weeks, we've read seemingly endless news about women
mistreated at the hands of experts who managed to become experts
despite knowing nothing about women’s bodies beyond, “make dat ass
smaller” and “she’s mad she must be on her period SEE SHE IS FINE!”
And that may sound like a gross exaggeration for comedic effect,
but it’s an accurate portrayal of the amateur hour horrorshow that
was funded and fostered by Nike, who could have made MORE money if
they’d bothered to give a crap about the athletes they were
developing.
In a
win-at-all-costs atmosphere at the best-funded training center in
the world, one would expect the athletes to have all the support
they needed for human optimization so they could, like, WIN.
Spoiler alert: they did not. Salazar employed neither nutritionist
nor psychologist, so it’s not an exaggeration to say my original
group of trainees at Life Time back in 2014 had access to more
resources and to better care than Kara Goucher and Mary Cain had in
that same year.
To be
very clear, I am a hobbyjogger who coaches hobbyjoggers and LOVES
it. If we are apples, the pro athletes we will be discussing today
are oranges and we all know it would be irresponsible to compare
the two. That said, there’s a lot us hobbyjoggers can learn from
the Nike disaster besides, ‘thank God we are not elite”. We can
have goals for ourselves, we can have goals related to our bodies
and performance, and we can push ourselves AND stay healthy, as
long as we have a clear, defined idea of where the danger zone is,
where the law of diminishing returns kicks in and ‘more’ gets you
‘less’, and the tradeoffs we are making as we proceed.
Alex
Lanton, my longtime physical therapist in Denver, CO and the
medical professional I trust the most, talks about how to assess
your needs as a runner when it comes to physical therapy and how to
assess the quality of the care you are getting, among other things.
In addition to talking about root causes of common (and commonly
normalized) running injuries such as plantar fasciitis, he talks
about what he wishes more runners knew and what most runners
definitely need to get.
Dr. Alex Lanton of Atlas Physical Therapy in Stapleton, CO is a doctor
of physical therapy with the OCS certification as well as licenses
for dry needling and manual therapy who doesn’t sleep because he
has 2 kids under 3! Go Alex!
Links
MK Fleming is the founder of Fitness Protection, LLC
and Sarah Axelrod leads Fitness Protection's #CoachedandLoved Community. Try
our accessible, affordable monthly running plans at www.fitnessprotection.com!