Runners turn to yoga and cut down injuries

Press, 22 October 1981, Page 17

Runners turn to yoga and cut down injuries

.Story:

GARRY ARTHUR

Pictures:

DAVID ALEXANDER

When Chris Burden left Christchurch a week ago on her way to run in the annual New York marathon, she had in her bag the tape-recorded voice of her yoga teacher. Margaret Marfin. Chris, whose trip to the United States is her prize for being the first woman home in the Nike marathon in June, is one of a growing number of Christchurch athletes who are convinced that hatha yoga can help them avoid such injuries as pulled muscles and ligaments, and damaged joints.

They attend a twiceweekly yoga session which Margaret Martin holds specially for athletes. Runners tense, tighten, and contract their muscles, and many stretching exercises have been designed for them to undo the harm this does. Hatha yoga is an exercising system of "stretching without struggling." leading to flexibility through detailed attention’to areas of tightness.

Breathing is the controlling factor. "Send all your breath right down to your legs." Margaret Martin tells her class, all prone on their mats. "The legs should be nice and warm."

It sounds impossible — it is impossible — but the mind

somehow “sends" the breath to the limb or joint that the athlete is working on, and it helps with the pose.

It turns out that runners have more difficulty achieving the yoga poses than sedentary layabouts, because of the tightness caused by running. "If you can’t straighten your legs." the tutor tells them as they try one exercise, “your hamstrings are very short. You'll need a lot of work on leg stretching."

Some of the athletes have been attending hatha yoga classes for two or three years, and are able to con-

tort their bodies quite effortlessly. it seems, into the weird poses devised by Indian yogis.

They do it. not by forcing their bodies, but — ideally — by relaxing, helped by breath control. The body goes some of the way on the exhalation, the position is held during the inhalation, and then the student moves further into the pose on the next exhalation.

“Surrender to the pose," is Margaret Martin’s constant advice. If it hurts, the athlete is pushing instead of relaxing. Joel Kramer, an American hatha yogi, calls the

exploration of the body’s limitations “playing the edges." He says this "elicits a quality of attention which places you in the living instant — this is the essence of yoga."

Kramer says that if you “push past your edge" into pain, the attention has been removed from yoga. You also risk pulling your muscles.

When Chris Burden started the yoga class at the beginning of the year, she felt she was an embarrassment to the rest of the class. “I was like a board.” she says. “I could hardly touch my toes.”

But she soon loosened up a lot, thanks to the stretching exercises, and says she noticed the benefit when she was running. “You feel as though you've had an oil- and grease.”

She has been running 130 to 140 miles a week since February, and finds that if she misses out her daily yoga exercises for a few days her back soon stiffens up.

“I do yoga for an hour a night,” she says, “and I’m sure that's why I haven’t had any injuries. You come home a bit agitated, but once you've done the breathing it relaxes you."

Margaret Martin recorded three tapes for her so that she could practice the yoga exercises and relaxation techniques in New York. “The night before the Nike marathon I listened to the relaxation tape virtually all night,” she says. Yoga is an important part of her training. On the morning of a race she does more yoga than running in preparation.

She finds that it relieves the tiredness and tightness that she often feels in the upper back. “It’s probably all in the head,” she says, “but it does give you a sense of feeling well.” Since she began teaching hatha yoga to runners, Margaret Martin has taken up serious running herself. “I decided to see what their bodies are really going through. Now I go on the hills twice a week.”

Her’ yoga for athletes developed out of her general yoga class because runners began asking for something specially for their needs. Many runners get back, and hip and knee injuries. She sees her job as helping

them to avoid injury and become more flexible. "In the cross-country this year,” she recalls, "conditions were terrible, and the ones who avoided injury were the yoga people. They were flexible enough to take the conditions."

Margaret Martin believes that hatha yoga helps you to “read" your body. "You can read your body from the inside out, instead of waiting until a muscle or ligament is torn."

She gave yoga classes at Arthur Lydiards four-day training session in Christchurch before Easter, and also at the Royal New Zealand Air Force’s marathon clinic, where she found that although the airmen were fit, 95 per cent could not squat or touch their toes.

Now a keen runner herself, Margaret Martin finds yoga and running mutually beneficial. “Since I’ve been running harder and longer my yoga has improved along with my running. I’ve built up my strength too.”

There is nothing obviously mystical or spiritual about the athletes’ yoga class, except perhaps at the end of the session, when they all lie down on their mats and their teacher turns out the lights in the big gymnasium.

As the liquid music of Zamfir’s pipes wells up from the sound system, Margaret Martin talks to her class, gently, almost hypnotically.

“Go through your spine, vertebra by vertebra,” she tells them. “Check that you are not holding any region tense . . . Now check that the left and right sides of the body are balanced evenly on the floor/"

“Fingers curved gently to the ceiling . . . neck and throat soft and relaxed. -

“Imagine that there is a soft, fluffy cloud floating in the clear blue sky, warmed by the sun, and that you are lying on top of that cloud.” Not another sound can be heard but the gentle breathing of the relaxing athletes. The effects of the music and their tutor’s voice are so soothing that some of them have been known to fall asleep before Margaret Martin gets to her benediction: “May health and happiness be with you all.”