A.M. - early shift today so that I could make it to managers' meeting on time. 6.5 miles up the old standby. Leg was not feel'n great, and overall didn't feel that good on the run. Sorry to be a downer. P.M. - So a couple weeks back, a respected blogger (and pretty fantastic runner), Mr. Scott Keate, recommended I go see this chiropractor dude (Dr. Rawlin) in Clearfield who specializes in M.A.T. to have him check out the leg. My appointment finally rolled around today. The visit probably lasted a good 30-45 minutes. Very energetic, charismatic guy, especially for it being 6 in the afternoon. Today was purely diagnostics. No treatment. He explained the philosophy of the treatment and ran a bunch of different tests on different muscles, group-by-group, looking for ones that aren't firing, and apparently I have several. I was a little surprised that little to no attention was given to my problem area. He basically did a full analysis of my lower body. He explained that as muscles become overworked they can breakdown and your body will cause them to shut-down (stop firing) to protect them from further damage. The body is an amazing machine and other muscles can adapt to perform a similar function of the muscle that has shutdown. Initially, you may not feel pain if the compensating muscles are doing a good job, but such adaptations cause additional stress on those areas and the problems can precipitate to various other muscles. Well-trained bodies can get away with this longer and to a greater extent. Eventually, things breakdown and pain ensues. He seemed to know what he was talking about. I have another appointment next week and that's when treatment will begin. Apparently, the trick is to find the few key areas that are thought to be the source of the problem(s). As those areas are treated, other areas that aren't problems in of themselves (i.e. the ones that are just out-of-whack because they're compensating) will begin to self-correct. Obviously I'm not doing the technicalities of the science (or pseudo-science if it doesn't work) justice. If the treatment works, improvement should happen very quickly. The jury is still out on this for me, but I'm anxious to get started to see if this is legit! Dr. Rawlin is pretty sure the issue isn't a stress fracture. He even pulled out a tuning fork(!) and played around with it on my leg. Its not a perfect test, but according to him, its a good one and the results didn't suggest a S.F. Given that, I'm going to keep running.
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