Balance – Boston Marathon Training Week 5

How balanced are you? Can you stand on one leg without wobbling for 30 seconds? What about on the other leg? Can you do it with your eyes closed? If you can do all this (and more) one legged balance stuff then good for you! If you’re a bit (or a lot) wobbly, join the club. My, “I’m just a bit out of balance” club.
In reading “Anatomy for Runners” (Jay Dicharry) I was reminded that balance is important. Doing one-legged balancing drills shows that even with all the work I’ve done to strengthen my body, I still have balance issues, favoring one side of my body over the other. This is a problem when running because it means that the favored side is usually doing more work. For me, that meant my left leg getting overworked in my last two marathons. So, as I strength train, I need to also work on strengthening the weaker.
Balance is not just a term for thinking of how strong each side of our body is or well we can stand on a single leg. Here are some other thoughts about balance.
1. Balance does not mean equal. A balanced diet does not mean that we eat equal amounts of everything. Rather, we eat adequate amounts of what we need. For me, this could get complicated so I’ve settled on a balanced diet is one that is largely free of processed foods (& added sugars) and is filled with vegetables, fruits, whole grains, some meat, and a bit of fat… and the occassional glass of wine or beer or other treat.
2. Balance does not mean everything is effort is the same. This is important to think about in terms of training paces. Easy runs are supposed to be easy and easy runs are supposed to be the majority of training runs. While the concept has not been hard for me to learn, I do sometimes struggle with actually doing it. It’s tempting to push that easy pace into a moderate pace while telling myself, “look how much better I’m getting!” For proper training balance those easy runs must be truly easy, and when they are, I’m ready for the hard workouts which makes them way more fun! Most seem to agree that a proper balance is 80% easy and 20% hard.
3. Balance means not doing the same thing over and over again. Do you know that our bodies are amazingly adaptive? They are. So much so that if we continue to do the same exercise over and over again, our bodies get used to that exercise. This is another reason for the 80/20 rule from above…or, don’t always run at the exact same pace, and don’t always do the exact same run…unless you are fine with where you are. The same applies when we’re strength training. Don’t do the exact same exercises each week. Mix it up. This doesn’t need to be complicated, for instance if you’re doing lunges (my plan usually calls for 2 seats of 10 on each leg), don’t always do the same lunges. There are lunges with weights, walking lunges, jumping lunges, forward, backward, and side lunges and so on. Mixing it up is more fun and your body will respond better.
4. Balance is important for life. Life is not all running, school, work, family, church, hobby or… I started running as a form of self-care. It was a way to step away from the stresses of my job as a pastor. It’s helped and the time running has helped me to thing through issues and even write sermons. I’ve found a good balance here.
What have you learned about balance in your own life?
Here’s my training log for last week: