To Bear The Brunt Of The Barefoot Run...

...we're talking something akin to Shakespeare's sound & fury here, folks.

Everywhere I turn, during every run I take with other runners, someone talks about either the barefoot running or the minimalist shoe mania. I'm certain using the term mania is accurate, because the proponents, even the ones who have minimal knowledge of biomechanics or sports performance, are all in a barely-controlled lather. Naturally, when a National Public Radio news program comes out with the results of a research article published in the journal Nature, that's when you know the manic have turned mainstream.

Daniel E. Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist, & others looked at the foot strike patterns of runners who wore shoes, & compared them to the patterns of runners who did not. Since our ancestors didn't have K-Swiss K-Onas, or Nike Frees, or Newtons, or even Asics Speedstars, it's safe to presume they were better built to deal with traveling the world (whether at high or low speed) barefoot. Here's the abstract from Nature:

'Humans have engaged in endurance running for millions of years, but the modern running shoe was not invented until the 1970s. For most of human evolutionary history, runners were either barefoot or wore minimal footwear such as sandals or moccasins with smaller heels & little cushioning relative to modern running shoes. We wondered how runners coped with the impact caused by the foot colliding with the ground before the invention of the modern shoe. Here we show that habitually barefoot endurance runners often land on the forefoot (forefoot strike) before bringing down the heel, but they sometimes land with a flat foot (midfoot strike) or, less often, on the heel (rearfoot strike). In contrast, habitually shod runners mostly rear-foot strike, facilitated by the elevated & cushioned heel of the modern running shoe. Kinematic & kinetic analyses show that even on hard surfaces, barefoot runners who forefoot strike generate smaller collision forces than shod rearfoot strikers. This difference results primarily from a more plantarflexed foot at landing & more ankle compliance during impact, decreasing the effective mass of the body that collides with the ground. Forefoot & midfoot strike gaits were probably more common when humans ran barefoot or in minimal shoes, & may protect the feet & lower limbs from some of the impact-related injuries now experienced by a high percentage of runners.'

You've heard of driveway moments if you've listened to NPR long enough. Those are the moments when a report is so good you sit in the driveway & don't get out of the car until the report is done. Well, I nearly had a Tourette's Syndrome moment; I was still several miles from the house & grateful my windows were rolled up so nobody could hear me curse.

First - if your study is funded by a company which makes minimalist shoes (Vibram, to be exact!) you're not going to bite the hand that feeds you (or, your lab assistants; Lieberman says he received no personal income from the company). We also know the dictum of research universities: publish or perish. If someone's going to pay for research I can publish, so much the better.

Second - while Lieberman states he is a marathoner, the NPR interviewer does not tell us whether he is a three-hour guy or a five-hour guy. Yes, there is a difference between the running style of faster runners & the less fast ones. A person who is walking will naturally strike first near the heel & then roll forward onto the ball of the foot. Slower runners & joggers also tend to do the same, as a natural extension of the walking gait. As the speed of the run increases, the runner tends to do either one of two things:

They pound the heels into the ground because they're overstriding (a result of experience in sprint-focused sports such as football, basketball and baseball), which causes shock-related stress & the injuries which result, or...

They adapt; shortening the stride & strike closer to the midfoot or the forefoot.

Third - the report was not an injury study, & Lieberman has no hard science to support his theory. Besides, my shoeless ancestors weren't running on Gonzales Street in the East Pensacola Heights, which is a slab of concrete. It is more likely they were running & walking on grass or dirt trails, which meant they had a better surface in the first place on which to run.

So, before you go throwing those running shoes into the rubbish, follow the money behind the research. Take a closer look at your stride mechanics. You can't, & probably shouldn't change, but a small part of your running mechanics. There are little tweaks you can do, but beyond a certain point there is the risk of serious injuries which can make you Once A Runner. If you decide to try a minimalist shoe work into them gradually (once again, the ten percent rule of thumb!) to see whether your muscles, tendons, ligaments & bones can handle the change.

Looking Past The Right Now

While I'm not the most savvy person on financial matters, I do know when something smart comes past my ears. One of my fellow Toastmasters spoke on long-term investing this morning; she mentioned a little-known fact at the front end of her speech on individual retirement accounts that just might fit the running realm, too. The graph above cites the number of times the word recession was mentioned in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The gray bars are the periods of time when the economy was really in a period of recession. It either means one of two things: Economic writers are full of unprocessed fertilizer material. Or, economics is more difficult than we all think. Perhaps it means both.
No, what it means (in my humble opinion) is that by the time folks figure out what is happening around them the situation has nearly passed. If I translate this to training for the typical runner, it means without developing a long-term goal and a corresponding training plan that spans at least six months, and perhaps even a year-to-two years, the period of opportunity (where the individual athlete may most benefit from training) may long be past. While (nearly) nobody in their right mind would undertake a six-week training period for a marathon, there are plenty of persons who will jump into a 10k, 15, 21.1k race with little or no training whatsoever to prepare for the distance. Even more amazing is when they race, have a performance that doesn't meet their expectations, and complain the training plan the coach provides is wrong for them.

No. You have to look past the immediate. It's not just the elite athlete who benefits from looking three or four years up the road, beginning to visualize where they want to be at that point. Beijing, and the starting line for the events, were in the minds of every distance runner, sprinter, and triathlete probably from the day after their competition in Athens, or the day after the Olympic Trials if they failed to make the team. That vision, that goal, is probably the main thing that drove each Olympian to get out of bed and onto the bike, the track, the pool when it was too dark, too cold, too hot, too early, too whatever for the rest of us.

It takes more than a pithy bumper-sticker-quality statement, like Maurice Greene's 'to be number one you have to train like number two', to motivate. It's probably why I prefer to save that sort of stuff for myself...usually when I am in the middle of a seemingly senseless repeat workout, or dragging Speedo-clad butt in the pool and not feeling like I'm getting any faster or stronger.
As Coach Ethan Barron says, 'if you don't truly believe what you are saying, then don't say it.'

Of course, there's always the choice of cycling from pool to pool, as Frazz mentions. That's why I am at the track three days a week. There's always the never-ending hope friends will return to (as some outsiders used to say) hard-core training. So, even I have to look beyond past the immediate, the very quiet, very cold and damp right now to the warmer, more cluttered and sunny afternoons of spring.

You Can't Sugar-Coat Bad News

This e-mail arrived in my account this morning as I was settling in to figure out a collection plan for a project I'm starting. I guess you could say we saw the handwriting on the wall about a month ago, but there were still some (irrational?) hopes for a rescue on the part of a resource sponsor with large pockets (and perhaps the ability to tolerate a top-heavy organization).

Hello Everyone, As I head out...this morning, this is a particularly difficult email for me to draft; I am just not certain where to begin....Just last month I was made aware...had been cut from...budget schedule. Soon after, I heard there was the potential to disestablish...entirely in FY09. Since that time, I have been seeking other options (and funding sources....Despite the...support from many of our customers, I was informed this week that all funds..., starting in FY09 have been zeroed out....This means as of 01 Oct 08, ...will be gone. As most of you know, we have a good number of influential supporters, and several have been speaking up on our behalf, but I am fearful their words are falling on deaf ears....I have talked several times..., and made alternative proposals..., but none has had any traction--except one. In desperation, I made a proposal to maintain a group that would only work...projects and lean heavily on the Science of Learning. This group would be comprised of a smaller number of people....I have been asked to put a brief together and brief the...Governance Board of Directors (GBOD) this Thursday. My hope is that the...support...present at the GBOD, will continue to push to ensure...existence. We all understand that...budget cuts are necessary to offset...costs...; however, I have a hard time understanding how a small...relatively inexpensive to operate and consistently delivers positive cost benefits...(our cost $17m return $450m+) can be placed on the chopping block without undergoing any formal business process reviews. I can't easily accept the decision to cut...funding, and I will continue to work with our Sponsors and Customers, as well as our...leadership, to find ways to negotiate both sides...out of this stalemate. The fight isn’t over yet, hang in there with me for a while...very respectfully...

Sometimes, when you are a coach, you have to learn the best way to say a bad message. There's three methods: hard-and-fast, diplomatic, and sugar-coating. Before I talk about them, let me be honest and say that there's no coach on the planet who likes passing on bad news. As an athlete, I certainly felt the opposite, let me tell you.

Hard-and-fast is the most painful for the athlete to hear, and the least painful for the coach to provide. "You're never going to get any faster in the five-thousand meters." That's a good example. Hopefully, the coach will be smart or insightful enough to say something like, "however, you do have great endurance and might be able to run some great half-marathons" as a salve for the wound they just inflicted.

Then, there are coaches like me who would much prefer to be diplomatic in our tack. Rather than say, "are you freakin' out of your mind!? You've been running all of three months. A marathon is going to turn you into a non-runner," we try to say, "let's try a few 5,000-meter races first, then move up to the 10K, and so on..." However, rather than listen to our voice of reason, most athletes who will make that particular decision either go do the marathon and get injured so badly they never want to run more than a mile a whack ever again, or they go to one of those "four miles a day, three days a week, and don't forget to walk every ten minutes" training programs. Then I see them on crutches in the local running emporium and all I want to do is sidle up to them and say, "see? I told you it was a bad idea..."

Sugar-coating does neither the athlete nor the coach any good. The message never gets across clearly, and the intent is lost. Invariably, the blame game occurs and both sides lose.