Links and Yoga

It's Saturday which means maybe you have some extra time on your hands (or perhaps you are no where near the computer because you work on one all week?)...so I have some links for you to check out...

First of all, I did my first ever guest post on Meghan's blog and it's about my trip to New Zealand. You should definitely check it out and please leave some comments :) Part 2 of my post will be up tomorrow. My hope is that it convinces everyone to take some time off and take a long flight to a beautiful country (and while you are there stop in Australia, my real favorite place). I don't write a lot about my travels on this blog, but I love to travel and see new things. I asked you guys where you wanted to hear about and New Zealand won so...go check it out!

Link #2 and #3- I went a little crazy earlier today writing articles, if you are a teacher of kids in the primary grades check out math journals and if you love pumpkin as much as I do, check out healthy pumpkin ideas.

Also, you might be wondering: How is the Yoga Challenge going? Last Sunday (November 1st) I pledged to take 10 minutes every day and do yoga. Here are some observations I have had since I began:

• I have no problem with fitting in yoga on exercise rest days, but sometimes when I give an hour to spinning, it really annoys me to have to give more time to yoga.
• Doing yoga 10 minutes per day has forced me to come up with my own yoga routines and just do what feels right at the time. I like this style of yoga for a change of pace and even when I am using dvds now I find myself adapting to the poses that I enjoy the most.
• I love pigeon pose. I have to do pigeon at least once per day. Looking at photos online I think I may be doing it wrong, but everyone at my studio leans forward and puts their head on the ground while they do it, no one online seems to do that. Oh well.
• I have discovered yogadownload.com which I love. 20 minute yoga videos for free! You do have to know yoga a little bit to do these videos since they are simply audio. I like this because I am getting sick of trying to look at my computer screen in the middle of a pose, but obviously it's not for total beginners. There was something in the video I did today (Power Vinyasa Flow #1) that I had no idea what it was. I think it was called standing splits...or something splits, but frankly I doubt I can do anything with splits in the name so I just did some extra sun salutations while they went through that part.
• I totally did not do 10 minutes yesterday. I did 20 today to make up for it. I decided to change my sidebar to say "6 days this month" instead of the days in a row. I don't want to give up just because I missed one single day. I still did yoga 6 out of the last 7 days, that's pretty good.

I hope everyone is having a great weekend!

Guest Post from My Sister!

Hi everyone! This is Kelly’s younger sister, Caroline, who you may have read about in earlier posts (I did the Triathlon with her!). As you may have noticed, Kelly hasn’t posted for a couple days, which is SO unlike her and as a dedicated follower I started to get concerned. She is super busy preparing for conferences and lessons and has another bachelorette party to go to this weekend. Lately, I have been getting really into this whole blogging thing, I’ve been reading some other blogs and thinking about starting my own! So I decided it would be fun if I wrote a post for Kelly and see how this whole thing works!

I am a college student pursuing my bachelors in Marketing and Finance. I love sports (watching and playing). Growing up, they pretty much took over my life but I loved every second of it. Now that I’m in college and not playing organized sports anymore, I have to be more creative in terms of working out and staying in shape. Surprisingly, motivation isn’t really the issue… I love being active, but throughout college other obstacles have prevented me from being as active as I like.

Which brings me to my topic: Shin splints.

Shin splints might just be my biggest enemy. I first developed shin splints when I was a sophomore in high school playing soccer. They got really bad simply because, I hate quitting. When my coach would say get on the goal line it’s time to sprint, I wasn’t about to say I couldn’t because of a little leg pain. However, I think this ended up really hurting me. After my senior year, when my sports career (sadly) came to an end, I picked up running. Within the first week, I was having shin pain again. I immediately went to my school trainer and he gave me some exercises to do with a resistance band in order to strengthen my shin muscles.

This didn’t help. For the next TWO years I battled consistent shin pain. Just walking around campus would hurt. I wasn’t able to run more than ten minutes at a time so instead, I tried swimming to fill my exercise deficiency. I went to at least three different doctors/physical therapists to try to figure out why I couldn’t even run a mile without severe pain. This shouldn’t happen to someone at my age!

Finally, I scheduled an appointment to meet with a doctor recommended by my parents. After only couple minutes of observing my feet, he said I have slightly flat feet, causing me to “over pronate” and that I should get customized orthotics to fix this problem.

Over pronate? How had no one ever told me this before? As soon as I got home I obviously researched it and information about shin splints connected to over pronation is EVERYWHERE. I found that over pronation is when the foot rolls inward too much causing stress on the inner shin. How did I miss this? Or better yet how did the THREE other doctors who I went to before this miss this? (One doctor actually told me I needed surgery!)

For the next six months, I wore my orthotics everywhere. I didn’t run and instead waited until the inflammation went completely away (yes, this took SIX months). However, it was all worth it the end! Four months later, I have since been able to run my first 5k and participate in my first triathlon!!

Even with my orthotics though, I sometimes my shin splints come back if I run too far, too fast, or outside. I’ve found that a shorter stride and landing on the middle part of my foot often helps, but sometimes I wish I could enjoy a nice fall day by running outside. Does anyone have any experience with this kind of chronic shin pain? If so, do you have any advice for running outside shin splint less? I’d love to hear all your thoughts!