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Monday, October 22, 2012

Readjustment

Sometimes, we need to take time to readjust ourselves.  One time I had to REALLY readjust myself was when I went to America for college.  Raised in Japan for most of my 18 years, being half American half Japanese, going to an international school... I was a TCK.  For all y'all that don't know what a TCK is, it stands for Third Culture Kid.  The thing about us TCK's are that we don't exactly fit in where we go.  We can make a lot of adjustments and can deal with other cultures but we find ourselves somewhat homeless.  Finding my niche in Japan at my school, it was nice being around other TCKs but it was time for me to spread my little wings and go off into the big world.  I flew away and landed in Knoxville TN, going to Johnson Bible College (now Johnson University).  Over here, I learned just what exactly it meant to be a TCK.  My first semester in college, I had never felt so alone in my life.  My roommate was a senior who was engaged and had all the late night stories possible for his significant other, and I was still getting used to this place.  Made a couple friends... but the first semester was pretty terrible.  After a year, I was more or less accustomed to the culture around me, but still was an 'outsider'.

It took me a lot of time to get myself to the point where I was more or less adjusted to the culture around me, but you know, after a little over six years, I've adjusted fairly well to the culture around me.

Running can be just like that.  After running a 50 mile race, my body had to take a little break from running because of all the strain that race put on my body.  I'm worried about my right knee because I've strained it too much before, making it easier for it to get hurt. After the race, I've had to deal with it, but since I took a break from running for a whole week, I was able to rest it up.  Today, I went for a 3.51 mile walk which took me 54:20 to do (a 15:27 min/mile pace) and my leg felt pretty good for walking in flip flops.  At night, I decided that I was going to try out running since it's been over a week since I've actually ran.  I knew it wasn't going to be far and I knew that I had to keep my knee in check, so I just did a nice little jog.  I jogged around the apartment complex for 12:30 and ran 1.35 miles (a 9:17 min/mile pace) and although I felt like my knee might start hurting, because I stopped, I was able to keep the knee from being injured.  I also noticed that as I was running, I slightly changed my form so that my left leg was taking the brunt of some of the work.  The thing about the body is that no matter what you're trying to do, when one part is weak, the tendency is to compensate it by letting another part of the body take that work load.  Now that does help my leg from getting hurt worse, but it also makes my running inefficient.  In order for my leg to heal and my running form to not lose efficiency means that I need to ease into the whole thing again.

Instead of running 5 miles at once, it looks like I'm going to divide that up during the course of the day and run bits and pieces so that before my knee starts feeling like it's weakening, I would stop, helping my leg become stronger and insuring that my form wouldn't lose efficiency.  Readjustment takes time and effort, as well as understanding what needs to be done.  We need to adjust and readjust a lot of things as we go through our lives, and in running, it is especially important because if we do it wrong, it affects our abilities as runners.

Use time wisely when readjusting yourself so that you won't grow the wrong way, which would mean more readjustments. making it counterproductive.  Take the right steps and walk carefully so that you would grow.

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