Running off path – stabilizing your body.

Running off path – stabilizing your body.

Regularly I go running, next to my other training. My mobility and strength training is probably what really keeps me fit, but I have this urge to move, to be on my way somewhere and really switch off while I’m on my way. I feel that this is also perfectly natural. In fact I’m sure we all should be running and walking more.

Hunter gatherers today will walk an average 8 to 10 miles a day, on their hunts and to forage for food… just about every day. So probably our paleo ancestors would have done similar. Apart from that they would have had to sprint often enough to make a kill or escape from being killed, they would have had to do spontanious heavy lifting and dragging, and probably they would have spent some of their social time ritually dancing, wrestling and grappling and playing games that would train their speed, strength, ability to react, and so on, to keep fit, alive and harmonized, and ready for anything that might come.

This is something completely different to sitting in an office or working at some machine or whatever, and there are only few exceptions today. Of course, things being the way they are, we can’t all take time to wander around 10 miles every day; although we can use as many stairs as possible instead of lifts, we can ride a bike instead of a car on moderate distances, and so on.

I do use my bike a lot and get a lot of movement every day in comparison with most people around me. Yet still I have to fit in what probably was once upon a time the greatest part of the day, wandering around, foraging and hunting if they had the opportunity, which would mean stalking, running and so on.

So I just make sure I run regularly, and when I do, I run great parts off path to get the greatest benefit out of what I’m doing. You don’t even have to be miles out in the sticks to do this kind of running. All you need to do is get off the main paths, or even off paths at all. I run through pieces of woodland, up and down the hill created by an old rubbish tip, which is now totally over grown and even protected as a nature reserve. Or I dash along the sides of freshly ploughed fields, or as in my video below, along the edges of fields that have been rotivated, and now the soil is hard and dry, are extremely uneven to run on.

The sense of all this is to really get my feet working, to strengthen them and mobilize their full flexibility. Apart from my feet though, this kind of running activates my brain, which has to process totally different information every time I put a foot down, and give my body the right orders to adapt to the ground I’m running on. Also my core and back are fed with a never ending series of impulses to keep me upright and balanced, so they get a far better workout than when running on even surfaces.

The video below is underlayed with music created at [ANGSTRÖM:INSTITUTE]. Enjoy watching!

Get outside and move to your roots!
wild-horse 09/2016