Now that my race season is officially over, I'm settling into the offseason. My focus for the offseason this year is to finally get to the bottom of my hip and hamstring issues and build a solid foundation to move into spring and next year's training cycles. 

These hamstring and hip issues have been a bother since basically the spring. It started with my left hamstring, then that seemed to heal. But immediately after my right hip flexor flared up. By the time I ran the Rehoboth Half, I was dealing with both my right hip flexor soreness, and my left hamstring was back causing problems too. 

I'm fairly convinced these two things are linked, and I'm assuming I changed my form in the summer to address the hamstring issue and that likely caused the hip issue. 

So, the offseason is the time to fix that. Despite that fact that I've been more focused than ever on strength training to conquer muscle imbalances, I think the culprit here is still weak glutes. 

I've scheduled an appointment for next week to get both my hip and hamstring worked on. I'm hoping if I can start by releasing some of the built up tension and soreness, I can move forward with a focused regimen of targeted glute strength and hip mobility work. 

I'm also putting myself on a forced hiatus from running until after that appointment. It's been killing me inside because we've had some unseasonably warm days lately and I've really wanted to run, but I can tell these two weeks off have definitely helped my hip. So walks and strength training only for now. 

After next week's assessment, I hope to be able to focus on building a solid foundation to eventually layer running back in. My first step is finding a mobility plan that I will actually commit to doing on a daily basis. This has always been a struggle for me. I tend to be really good about it for a week and then fall off pretty quickly. 

The second element of my offseason training plan is to dedicate one of my strength training workouts to runner-specific moves that target the glutes and hips. Most of my strength workouts are full body efforts, so those muscles definitely get hit. But it's proven to not be quite enough, so I want to take a more targeted approach. 

And the last thing will just be maintaining a steady base of running -- as soon as my hamstring and hip allow. The best part about winter running is that you don't have to get up before the sun to beat the heat and humidity, so I plan to enjoy lunch time runs and later morning runs on the weekend. 

My hope is that with this focus on rehab and building this strong foundation that when it comes time to pick races for 2022 and start training, I'll be ready to go.