I met with Larry the Physio last night and we talked about my concerns with the imbalance with my left leg. Larry measured the diameter of my left calf and thigh and concluded that there was a notable difference with the left being much smaller than the right. I was surprised by this as I thought that this was a normal thing (people always have a stronger right hand if they are right handed for example). To the contrary and quite logically, Larry pointed out that the each leg has the same job and should be of equal strength. In one strength test of hopping on my toes on each leg for one minute, it was obvious that my left leg was by far the weaker. So we'll need to deal with that. Whilst treating the imbalance is an important factor of fixing the shin splints, overall its my running style that it causing the damage. It would appear that I am a heel striker. That's not a problem as many runners are heel strikers but my problem is that my heel hits the road hard and too far in front of my body. This has a breaking effect and causes impact stress on my lower legs. Because my left leg is weaker than the right - it suffers first and the classic impact injuries occur. So I need to deal with the imbalance by calf stretching (reps of dropping the heels off a stair) and I have some yoga type positions for hip alignment. I also have a regular exercise of digging my toes and feet into the wet sand until my foot is covered (then uncover & repeat etc) to strengthen my ligaments around my forefeet. This should assist with the recovery of my nagging metasarsil injury. The running technique is going to be harder to get used to. I need to try and flatten the position of my foot so that the heel strikes only slightly before the ball and then the forefoot. As Andy the Pod said many moons ago - I need to learn to run quietly. Larry suggests that I take certain aspects of the Pose Technique on board. I also found Gordon Pirie's website which has a frrreeee book to download called Running Fast and Injury Free. It appears that his ideals are similar but perhaps not as extreme as Pose. Guru Larry says one way of teaching yourself to run quietly and therefore with less impact is soft sand running. It appears that I must attempt to run on top of the sand rather than excavating big holes. So tonight I'm off to Bondi for my first dig (so to speak). Mood: --->

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