Roll out

Here is a post about how I found myself sitting on my bedroom floor, warbling an Adele song in the dark--all because of a fabulous, understated piece of fitness equipment.

I adore my foam roller, and as my running mileage piles up over the years, its value creeps higher and higher.  If you don't love them yet, you've probably at least seen piles of them at the gym. The basic idea is that you can use it to work through tight muscles in a way that I find much more painful effective than normal stretching.  People use it for everything: shoulders, calves, quads, glutes.  (There are loads of youtube videos to demonstrate.) I love it for my hamstrings and always-too-tight calves.  Someone else in my household has been known to massage his back with the roller in front of the TV.  I read once somewhere that many elite runners allocate 30 minutes per day on the foam roller.  Obviously, I'm not in that company, but it sure would be nice.

A foam roller is nothing fancy and pretty self-explanatory: a big piece of tough foam, between one and three feet long. In case you wanted to get a visual of the size difference in a not-to-size graphic, I will share the following image.  You can thank me in the comment section.

Credit to PerformBetter.com

This is a good time to add a disclaimer about the images used in this post, which are all courtesy of a Google image search.  I don't endorse any of the websites one way or the other--but most of the links will just lead to online foam roller shopping bonanzas.

But if you're ever in need of a laugh, I recommend a Google image search--not even necessarily about foam rollers, although these results in particular are priceless.  Typing in "foam roller" yields 400,000 images, ranging from very helpful tutorial snapshots to a lone image of a shirtless man in pale-wash blue jeans and no foam roller in sight.  A picture of Mighty Mouse was also among the results--completely unrelated to foam rollers, but sometimes I do feel like Mighty Mouse after I roll.

I never manage to look as cool as the woman on the right or as serious as the man on the left, though:

Credit to WSports

Credit to Squidoo

I also limit my rolling mostly to the living room in my home. But if I ever do want to tote my roller around town, I know where to go.

Credit to Exercise.com

I haven't taken my fascination beyond the entry-level roller.  The next roller upgrade (seen below) terrifies me.  It's like a stegosaurus roller.

Credit to Exertools.com

Last Christmas, my brother had his very own foam roller waiting for him under the tree, and he quickly became a fellow roller aficionado.  We share a strange sense of humor and thought it was hilarious to generate an encouraging playlist for using the foam roller. 

Here it is so far:

• "Roll out" by Ludacris, featuring the timeless chorus, "Roll out! Roll out! Roll out! Roll out!"
• "Rolling on the river," by Creedence Clearwater Revival
• "Rollin'" by Limp Bizkit, featuring the timeless chorus, "Keep rollin' rollin' rollin' rollin'"

I think you see where this is going, unfortunately.  Last night, my hamstrings were really in need of the foam roller, but I forgot about it, started reading a book in bed, and had just turned out the light.  I remembered and popped out of bed to sit on the floor, lights off, for just a minute to roll out my calves.  And honestly, I don't know how I made it this far in the summer without adding Adele to the playlist.  But I yelled my realization to Josh and then, as if that weren't enough for my poor boyfriend, starting singing, badly, "Rolling in the daaaaaaAAAAAaaaarrrk."  

It wasn't my shining moment in life.  My legs felt a heck of a lot better, though.