Weight Lifting...for Runners

I like learning! It doesn't matter if it's cooking, or some kind of craft, or even a new study method - I rarely hesitate to try something new. There's one area I'm definitely not so comfortable with, though, and that's the realm of kinesthetic learning. Sports, secret handshakes, dancing...anything that requires some level of coordination between brain and limbs is rough for me.

So I decided that weight-lifting would be a perfect "out of my box" form of folk knowledge to learn for our class assignment. Initially, I had ambitious plans: go to the Smith Fieldhouse, find some guy lifting weights, and ask him to just show me a lift or two. Not that big a deal, right?

Wrong, at least for me at this point. My courage failed me, and I turned to at least a more familiar source to learn this unfamiliar skill from.

Luckily, I have a wonderful housemate, Melissa, who is really into staying in shape and knows a lot about that kind of thing. She's currently training for a marathon, and by my measures, she's an expert on anything that has to do with running.

This ties in because she actually lifts weights to improve her running form! I thought this was fantastic because running is something I do - this skill could actually be really useful to me.

Melissa didn't have a lot of time to spend teaching me (I didn't have all that much time either, for that matter!), so we decided to do it right at home!

She started out just showing me the hand and arm movements - I won't go into detail here, because it doesn't work so well with words, but there was one that looked like running and then several variations of lifting my arms up. I did some practice with Melissa watching me, feeling very silly as she gave hints like, "don't lift your arms above shoulder level for this one" and "make sure you go slow for that part." But I learned it!

Now I have a new option for my morning exercise routine, which has been rather dull of late. And the best part is that we discovered together that cans of food make great hand weights, so I can practice my new skill any day, right at home!