Posture and form

(Originally written on May 15)

Last Friday I took a late night walk in a park near where we live back home, trying to clear some thoughts in my mind and have a think about what I'd do in the future. Ended up not thinking about those stuff at all. Instead, my attentions turned to the way I walked.

Yup, you have to pay attention to the movements when you walk.

Back when I first started cycling, I didn't pay much attention to my pedaling style. In fact, even long after acquiring a pair of Shimano shoes and PD1056 pedals, I still wasn't fully utilizing the powerful system to it's full benefit. Now I know how to really pedal in circles. But back then, every stroke was forwards and downwards. Stomping as they call it.

Soon enough I started to develop regular cramping in my calf and thighs, particularly quads. Also, from those repeatedly sustained injuries, my calf muscles and Achilles tendons became tight, restricting the range of motions in my heels.

Walking bare-footed on hard grounds gives you a chance to get a good extension/stretch in the calf muscles. As shown below, in the typical designs of modern athletic shoes, the front of the sole has an slight arc. This design promotes quick forward shifting of one's body mass, and also helps the weight transition in running. But in daily exercises, especially in walking, this feature kind of lower the extent of your calf muscles (gastrocnemius and soleus) being stretched.

As noted in the above picture, walking in the common athletic shoes would probably result in your ankle look a bit like this. (The original drawing however has nothing to do with this topic. These are just convenient images found by Google... I've linked them back to the source pages and hopefully they won't sue me for the usage.)

On the contrary, walking bare-footed would get your hind-foot develop an heel angle like the above Egyptian. 

So then after walking for like half an hour, I felt a bit more range in my ankles' movement. Now that's a good sign.

And surprisingly, in the massage afterwards, I found... this.

 

It was the first time in a long period that I was able to get my calf muscles totally relaxed and softened up. That was probably due to my walking bare-footed, which effectively acted like a series of PNF stretching (with the eccentric contraction of the calf muscles in the hind leg every time when you've stepped out your front foot). Doing massage only wouldn't be of this much use.

And another isteresting fact is, with the complete relaxation of the calf muscles, I was able to locate an old wound caused by cramping. Apart from the different touch, you can even visually point out the whereabouts (as shown in the above enhanced photo) of the problematic tissue. A place with particullarly tought miscles and had cramped in neumerous occations in the past two or three years.

New start

New site of choice. Previously I've had blogs from several providers, but now I think it might be a good idea to start a new one under Blogger. It would also be my first one written totally (? we'll see...) in English, as many of my foreign friends can't really read those strange rectangular characters of 中文. It'll also serve as my training log (although at present there isn't any) and thoughts about sport massage therapy, something I've learned and chose to be my future profession.

More about those later!

Why the title?

I'm a cyclist who lives in Taiwan. I was born in Taichung City. When I picked up the sport during my 3rd year in highschool, I used to ride my $120 bicycle up a hill know as the Big Belly (大肚山, Da-Du Shan) in the nearby Taichung County. That name Big Belly, in turn, came from the name of a misterious aborigionee tribe (papora). It's been said they were one of the major dominating forces of flat-land aborigonate clans in the central part of this island before we Chinese people (the Han nationality to be precise) immigrated during the 18th centry. Not much is known about them, and probably nobody nowadays knows what the word "Dwa Do" in their language really means, but the name survived.

Taiwan is a mountainous island. We don't have many flat lands to begine with. My hometown Taichung City, for example, is not really a plane but more a kind of basin, central of the western part of Taiwan. At the west of this basin lie the Da-Du Hills, although from the habit of the Mandarin language you might hear it mentioned as Da-Du "Mountains" or something like that. At the eastern part we got Da-Keng, and the south-western we got Ba-Gua "Mountains." People who cycle in central Taiwan must be familiar with these areas.

Right. What about me? Well, I first learned to climb on one of the roads in the Da-Du hills. Not that I was an excellent climber... but to get a taste of it, nothing beats a 10% gradient, 500-meter-long, unforgiving, two-lane, you-can-only-see-sky-at-the-end deserted paved road in the middle of nowhere. Between the heavy breathing and hard pedaling action you find yourself a sort of rhythm, with the burning sensations in your legs, sweat forming on your forehead, and heart rate rocketing sky hight at a rate far greater than you are physically going upwards. And of course, the satisfactions that came after conquering it.

(Below are links to three photos of this very climb:

Chung-Tai Road overview;

Mid Sections of the climb;

and School of Theology at the roadside;

courtesy of Edinman)

Funny thing is I gave a name of that small nasty road all those years back, and it was adopted by the people riding around ever since. Although they might not know the origin (and would probably never bother anyway). If you understand the Chinese language, the nickname came from the School of Theology at the roadside, third link above. 神召天梯 means a ladder towards heaven, for those who have received God's call.

Of course from a competitive cyclist point of view it's nothing to brag about, but considering that it was my very first climb, an accent which I managed to finish without stopping on only the second attempt (stopped three times the previous day), it was still quite an achievement. And the stories pretty much started from here.