CHAPTER 8
WHEN McCASKILL WENT STRAIGHT
Superrunner Dan McCaskill was desperate to stop his agonizing pain. Could postural therapy save his career?
It was painful to watch. Awkwardly, agonizingly, a man, apparently a cripple, shuffled along, one shoulder tilted at a weird angle relative to the other, his left leg dragging behind him as if it were broken. It seemed to take him forever to move 20 yards. The crowd began to notice and murmur comments of sympathy. Poor old guy.
Then 58-year-old Dan McCaskill shocked everyone. He finally limped his way to the podium, then leaned forward. It was 1999. For the fourth year in a row, he was handed the first-place medal for winning his age-group at the Torrey Pines 5k run.
Maybe the finest masters road racer in the San Diego area over the previous 20 years, McCaskill, then of Carlsbad, made a career of proving that you don’t need to be able to walk to run. A retired Federal Agent with the U.S. Border Patrol and a former 82nd Airborne army paratrooper, McCaskill began running for fitness in the early seventies and soon was untouchable at races ranging from the 1,500 meters to the marathon. At age 39, he ran a 1:10 half marathon. At 40, he ran the fastest Masters 15k, 49:12, and a sub-32 10k. Training 75 to 100 miles a week, he became the national age-group 3000-meter steeplechase champion at 45. At 50, he won the national age-group 25k championship. At 55, he could still run a 34-minute 10k.
McCaskill’s competed in so many races—over 1,000, he thinks—and won so many of them, that he can’t remember times, dates, and even names of the events. But he has all of them—plus every daily workout in between—meticulously labeled, dated, and commented on in logbooks. Running and racing are his life.
“I’ve probably won my age-group at every race in San Diego,” he guesses. “Nobody could touch me. In my 40s, I could win races outright.”
He retired from work at 50 just so that he could concentrate on racing. As he neared 60, he could still finish in the overall top 25 of a 5k.
But while McCaskill thought he’d spend the rest of his days running happily into the sunset, his body stopped cooperating.
“Throughout my career, I’d always be crippled the day after the race, but I’d just take a pill and stretch,” he says. “Then, in the nineties, the pain got so bad that I thought I’d have to give up running for good.” In 1999, for the first time ever, he had to stop and drop out of two races because he was in so much pain.
A laundry list of injuries a kilometer long, starting in his youth, finally caught up with him. In high school, a broken femur kept McCaskill in traction for a month and a body cast for a year, leaving his left leg an inch longer than the right. He had two separated shoulders, skull fractures, and several cracked ribs from bike crashes in the eighties. Since 1981, he’s been plagued by chronic sciatica, which tightens his left leg during races, causes a limp when he walks, and often forces him to drive his car while sitting on one cheek of his ass. In 1984, his left Achilles tendon swelled to three times its normal size; on doctor’s orders, he didn’t run or bike for a year. The next year, when he got back up to 60 training miles a week, the Achilles flared again. He ran on it until he could stand no more, undergoing the first of five Achilles operations in 1994.
Dan McCaskill and friend.
In short, McCaskill was a mess. He tried everything: massage therapy, physical therapy, yoga 5 days a week, anti-inflammatories, vegetarianism, chiropractic treatment.
By January 2000, with his right Achilles now as bad as his left one ever was, and his shoulders so misaligned that a tailor had to make him a suit with one side of the collar sewn higher than the other, McCaskill knew he had to try something radical. His pain wasn’t just ruining his running, it was distorting his body, wrecking his life. On the recommendation of a friend, he went to Symmetry.
TRUING A BATTERED WHEEL
On January 27, McCaskill drove to Rancho Bernardo and hobbled into Patrick Mummy’s office.
“The second he walked in the door, it was obvious that Dan was the most inflexible man I’d ever seen,” said Symmetry’s cofounder and owner. “He was tighter than tight, no fluidity, total bilateral dysfunction and deviation.”
A gait and postural analysis proved it. Mummy measured McCaskill like a cabinetmaker measuring kitchen wall dimensions. Using a pelvation meter (basically a fancy level), Mummy found that the left side of McCaskill’s pelvis was angled 14 degrees, while the right side was angled 5 degrees—a whopping 9-degree disparity. His left shoulder blade was elevated 3 degrees. The hips and head tilted forward 4 degrees more than they should. The upper torso rotated right to left. The pelvis rotated left to right. The upper torso was offset to the left. McCaskill stood with too much weight on the right leg, both heels and on the inside of each foot.
McCaskill was like a bicycle rim way out of true; some spokes bore a heavy load while others did nothing at all. “His posture showed so many compensations and imbalances that it impacted his running, walking, and all his movements,” said Mummy.
When it was time for the diagnosis, he didn’t pull punches.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t understand how you can walk,” said Mummy. “To undo all your imbalances, it’s going to take lots of work over the next ten weeks.”
Mummy then made McCaskill an individualized, 10-position routine of stretching/strengthening exercises chosen to deemphasize his over-contracted muscles, particularly the unnatural left-hip elevation and the pelvic angle’s huge left-right disparity. The positions involved laying on his back with legs twisted, pressing against walls, and bending over chairs.
McCaskill was to do the hourlong routine at home twice a day, holding each position for several minutes. Once he showed progress with these exercises, Mummy would give him progressively more strenuous exercises. Symmetry has a bank of 350 exercises, about 30% of them straight from yoga, all pictured in the book and CD-ROM Symmetry: Relieve Pain, Optimize Physical Motion that McCaskill took with him.
Asked how the exercises felt on Day 1, McCaskill replied succinctly: “It hurt like hell.”
THE 10-WEEK PLAN
Like the old song, however, it hurt so good.
“Afterwards, my body was much more in alignment, looser, less painful. I had more range of motion in my movements. I walking much more fluid and balanced,” says McCaskill. “It was a rarity for me.” Technically, he was suddenly using his left side more equally with his right.
Through Week 1, McCaskill grew looser and his stride more fluid. He called some of the Symmetry positions “tortuous,” and was plenty sore in the worked areas, but the payoff was clear. On the morning of Day 4, he noticed he could walk down the stairs with far less effort than normal, not holding on to the banisters for the first time in years.
On February 1, after 6 days of exercises, McCaskill returned to Symmetry. The results: his hip angle disparity improved from 9 degrees to 4 degrees, with significant improvement in his shoulders, standing posture, and walking gait. He went home with a new set of exercises that targeted his unnatural rotation.
“Some of them were even more painful than the first ones,” said McCaskill. “My tendons, muscles, and bones were in complete rebellion.”
Technically, he was right. He was experiencing what Mummy calls “transitional pain,” where muscles resist as they are being reeducated to perform differently.
By Day 13, McCaskill was still sore, but felt a more balanced, longer stride with each run. His hip angle disparity dropped to 1 degree. Four days later, he did his first sustained high-intensity workout in years.
On Day 20 came a major breakthrough. For the first time in 25 years of running, McCaskill felt as if his left leg was “doing its job.”
On Day 27, McCaskill noticed he hadn’t taken a pain pill for a few days. He had much-improved range of motion in his shoulders and wasn’t limping as much while walking. Four days later, he finished the Torrey Pines 5k race in 20:23, taking first in the 55-59s, his fifth win in a row. He still looked like hell at the awards ceremony, but felt surprisingly good. A few days later, he was astounded to find that he had no sciatica pain.
March 15 (Day 48) was a landmark day with a twist: Despite a perfect 10-degree/10-degree hip angle, and increasing range of motion on his right side and shoulders, nearly all of McCaskill’s other measurements were worse. He had a great deal of muscular pain, and complained of a sudden decrease in left leg function.
The explanation, explains Mummy, is a final “transition phase,” where the body tries one last time to fight the changes. “It’s like the ‘detox’ phase in an alcoholic’s recovery program, where the body is ridding itself of its last toxins,” he says.
April 19 (Day 83) was Graduation Day, McCaskill’s last appointment with Mummy. And it was beautiful. The “detox” theory was correct. Perfectly matching pelvic tilts. Shoulders level. No trunk rotations. Left hip elevated just ½ degree. Side view and frontal plane flawless.
McCaskill took a final set of exercises from Mummy to do on his own, then did a hard Fartlek workout. He felt smooth and balanced. His sciatica didn’t act up. His limp was gone. He ran fluidly, with an even gait, and had no recovery pain later.
A string of wins followed. A 20:19 at the Clif Bar 5k. 21:58 at the Calloway 5k. A red-hot 19:48 at the Bonita Bunny Run 5k. 26:31 at the Temecula 4-miler. 42:18 at the Citrus 10k. 19:48 at Cal State San Marcos 5k. 26:47 at the Terry Fox 4-miler. A smokin’ 19:53 3rd place at the Turf to Surf 5k. All pain-free.
Was McCaskill cured? Technically, no: He’d have to do postural exercises the rest of his life, or risk regression, warned Mummy. But in terms of lifestyle, he truly felt like a new man.
“I am no longer the walking dead,” he said.
I first interviewed McCaskill for Competitor magazine in mid-2000, then followed up in June 2008. He had moved inland to Fallbrook, in rural northern San Diego County, where he bought a big piece of property and was running an hour a day on dirt trails with his greyhounds. But life hadn’t been as idyllic as it sounds.
In November 2000, after completing his 83-day Symmetry regimen and winning a slew of races, McCaskill had his fifth Achilles surgery. After a slow, painful recovery, he raced again the next March and began a 2-year winning streak that included a 22:28 at the Lake Elsinore 5k on November 22, 2003.
It was his last race.
“The pain was too great,” he said. “My sciatica.” After his Achilles operation, it came back worse than ever. Having moved an hour away from San Diego, he didn’t care to make the drive back to see Symmetry in San Diego. The next year, Mummy moved to Sacramento. So McCaskill switched to yoga seven days a week and worked out with weights and exercise balls. He took lots of painkillers. All the while, he kept running an hour a day with his dogs—but only slow, “junk” miles.
“I hurt too much to run hard, and had to take too many days off,” he said. “I was getting slower. And I won’t race if I can’t be competitive—it’d be too embarrassing.”
In 2005, an MRI told McCaskill what he had long feared: degeneration in his lumbar spine that was affecting the nerves of his spinal cord. It looked so bad that the doctor told him, “you ought to be paralyzed.” Years of running 75- to 100-mile weeks while misaligned had given him severe stenosis and spondylosis in his L-1 through L-5 vertebrae. Stenosis narrows the vertebrae tunnel and clogs it with bone spurs. Spondylosis narrows the space between adjacent vertebrae and causes them to loosen and shift around, like bricks after an earthquake. Both rub and pinch the spinal cord, leading to muscular weakness and severe pain in the neck, shoulder, arm, back, and/or leg.
“I needed it Roto-Rootered out,” said McCaskill. No operation does that perfectly yet, but 9½ hours of arthroscopic surgery on December 31, 2007, scraped some of the bone spurs off. Now the sciatica pain in his right glute is gone—but replaced by constant pain in his right calf. Another operation doesn’t excite him.
McCaskill’s not into self-pity. He doesn’t ponder the “what-ifs”—wondering what might have happened had something like Symmetry been around to straighten him out a couple decades earlier, before the damage was done. “Lots of people are a hell of a lot worse than me,” he says. “I did pet-assisted therapy with my greyhounds at old folks’ homes, and seeing them made me thankful for all I’ve been able to do. And I’m still healthy enough to run an hour a day—just not fast.”
Besides the running, McCaskill gets an all-body workout during three or four hours a day of pruning, digging, and raking on his property. All the searching on the Internet for solutions to his pain over the years has made him something of a walking, talking medical encyclopedia. And an optimist.
“I keep thinking the ‘immaculate solution’ is right around the corner,” he says. “They’ll soon be able to inject stem cells into my spine and fix the nerve damage. They’ve already done it with rats, you know. If all goes as it should, give me a call in 2011.”
That’s when McCaskill turns 70—and starts staging his comeback.