Running to be Healed  

An ankle injury brought multi-awarded, multi-champion runner and talented athlete Leszl Gitaruelas to her knees.   With 35 gold medals and 60 trophies for events in marathon, aerobics, arm wrestling and body building, Leszl is the first Filipina to have won the World Arm Wrestling Championship in 1991 and in 2006 was among the first top 10 runners who completed the Mount Kinabalu 11-kilometer climbathon in Malaysia.  Leszl was 300 meters away from the finish line when she collapsed. Even then, it was a defeat Leszl could take with high brows. It hardly crumpled her saying, “I failed to climatize to the place before the race,” Leszl recalls of her first skyrunning event.

An athlete since 1995, Leszl found her over a decade of gold medal studded running career stumble and crash when in March this year, a nozzle from a disengaged firehose whipped her right ankle causing her tendons to snap.

The orthopedic recommended surgery and told her she may not run for at least a month, depending on the innate recuperative abilities of her body. For a former arm wrestler, hearing the diagnosis felt like meeting the nemesis of her career in defeat. But while the world may have crashed on Leszl, it certainly was not the end of the race.

For marathoners, athletes, runners and aerobics enthusiasts, tendons or Achilles tendons serve to cushion and support body weight when a person walks, dances and especially run. A tendon is a type of connective tissue or thick cord that connects muscles to bones.  When tendons on the ankles are cut or injured, a person cannot run or walk.

In less than a month after going through surgery, Leszl was back on the race tracks and on the road for a five-kilometer run and back to Fitness First where she holds aerobics classes. 

No stitch.

Ankle and tendon injuries need not always go through invasive surgery. Leszl could have been spared from the knife had she gone through spine adjustment and rehabilitation through chiropractic medicine.

Through combined treatments of spine adjustment and massage therapy, tendon injuries in the ankles can be restored to its functional state without any stitch and without medication. What the chiropractic doctor does is adjust the spine to work on injuries on the ankles, then it is up to the recuperative abilities of the body to express itself. 

One thing nice about chiropractic medicine is that the person is healed without having to wear ankle braces or cast. The chiropractor actually releases a person from the shackles of braces and spares a person from ugly molds of casts in two to three sessions, wound-free. No-stitch, no-marks, no-bruises, no medication while having new, pretty feet, besides. And yes, one can run with just about the same speed and endurance as before the injury.

The other nice thing about chiropractic medicine is that after spine adjustments, other innate capabilities of the body such as – intellectual, emotional or psychological faculties – are optimized. While surgery is generally traumatic and sometimes puts a patient in a depressing state, chiropractic medicine restores a patient in top shape in mind and in physique.

For anyone who wants an injured part of the body restored to its original state, costs count. Between surgery and eight sessions with the chiropractor for ankle injuries, costs are not so significant as to say that one can scrimp from the other. It’s all a matter of choice – do you or do you not want to go through the knife?

For Leszl though the choice had nothing to do with the mode of healing. It was a choice between going back to the road, the tracks, the mountains, the gym or give up the only Life in her life – running.