My favourite dance

Under the drowning blue sky

far enough, fast enough 

a dance on

the soft grass

the rough trail

the hard road

one step ahead

of time

I’ve noticed that on some of my training runs for short periods I seem to get up on my toes and run. It is more leg extension, a longer stride.

I think it is related to more strength coming back into my quads and glutes. I can feel this when I walk. I walk much smoother, I’m looser around my hips, I feel the extra strength in my thighs.

I guess that the muscles and fibres that enable you to sprint are the high end tissues that take longer to develop. I’ve built muscle that at first was strong enough to hold my knee cap in place, and then to build slow twitch fibres and muscles to let me run slowly, and then get slowly faster.

No I am reaching the final stage of muscle development that lets me get up on my toes and sprint.

There is a difference to the way I run now, to the way I could when I was younger. When I was younger I remembered that when I went really hard, I was up on my toes, really sprinting, and I could sustain this, and it would feel relatively easy. Now when I go hard, it has been a kind of straining shuffle, without much leg extension, that really hurts.

On my cycle path runs, there have been a couple of occassions that I have gone up another gear, where I have felt like I’m up on my toes. Just like the way I remember running all those years ago.

I remember running from Miranda Fair, up Kiora Road Hill, finishing the training run strong. There was quite a hill that went for several hundred metres, but I could go hard up that hill. Then I’d sprint past the round about, the corner shop, turn left down the hill at Wonga Avenue to build up speed, and go hard the last few hundred to finish at 12 Kiwong Street.