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July 7 - September 12, 2021
PAINFUL TRUTH No. 1: The Best Shoes Are the Worst
RUNNERS wearing top-of-the-line shoes are 123 percent more likely to get injured than runners in cheap shoes,
Runners in shoes that cost more than $95 were more than twice as likely to get hurt as runners in shoes that cost less than $40.
“Wearers of expensive running shoes that are promoted as having additional features that protect (e.g., more cushioning, ‘pronation correction’) are injured significantly more frequently than runners wearing inexpensive shoes (costing less than $40).”
What a cruel joke: for double the price, you get double the pain.
beat-up running shoes are safer than newer ones.
as shoes wore down and their cushioning thinned, runners gained more foot control.
“When subjects were tested with soft versus hard shoes,” he said, “no difference in impact force was found.” No difference! “And curiously,” he added, “the second, propulsive peak in the vertical ground reaction force was actually higher with soft shoes.”
The puzzling conclusion: the more cushioned the shoe, the less protection it provides.
just the way your arms automatically fly up when you slip on ice, your legs and feet instinctively come down hard when they sense something squishy underfoot. When you run in cushioned shoes, your feet are pushing through the soles in search of a hard, stable platform.
Whenever I changed shoes, the impact levels changed as well—but not the way I’d expected. My impact forces were lightest in bare feet, and heaviest in the Pegs. My running form also varied: when I changed footwear, I instinctively changed my footfall. “You’re much more of a heel striker in the Pegasus,”
the people telling him he had to buy new shoes were the same people who sold them.
Arthur Newton,
“Dave is not the average individual. He’s curious, smart, the kind of guy you can’t BS real easy. He’ll say, ‘Hey, if it’s supposed to be this way, let’s see if it really is.’ ”
“Human Beings Are Designed to Run Without Shoes”
Alan Webb
“So we did foot-strengthening drills and special walks in bare feet.” Bit by bit, Webb watched his feet transform before his eyes. “I was a size twelve and flat-footed, and now I’m a nine or ten. As the muscles in my feet got stronger, my arch got higher.”
Paula Radcliffe
Haile Gebrselassie
Khalid Kha...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“The deconditioned musculature of the foot is the greatest issue leading to injury, and we’ve allowed our feet to become badly deconditioned over the past twenty-five years,”
“Pronation has become this very bad word, but it’s just the natural movement of the foot. The foot is supposed to pronate.”
On a hard surface, your feet will briefly unlearn the habits they picked up in shoes and automatically shift to self-defense mode: you’ll find yourself landing on the outside edge of your foot, then gently rolling from little toe over to big until your foot is flat. That’s pronation—just a mild, shock-absorbing twist that allows your arch to compress.
You have to land on your heel to over-pronate, and you can only land on your heel if it’s cushioned.
Your foot’s centerpiece is the arch, the greatest weight-bearing design ever created. The beauty of any arch is the way it gets stronger under stress; the harder you push down, the tighter its parts mesh. No stonemason worth his trowel would ever stick a support under an arch; push up from underneath, and you weaken the whole structure. Buttressing the foot’s arch from all sides is a high-tensile web of twenty-six bones, thirty-three joints, twelve rubbery tendons, and eighteen muscles, all stretching and flexing like an earthquake-resistant suspension bridge.
When shoes are doing the work, tendons stiffen and muscles shrivel.
nearly every case in his waiting room—corns, bunions, hammertoes, flat feet, fallen arches—was nearly nonexistent in countries where most people go barefoot.
“This is how we often learn things, when patients don’t listen to us,”
“The forward foot moves toward the track in a downward, backward, ‘stroking’ motion (not punching or pounding) and the outer edge of the ball of the foot makes first contact with the track,” Wilt writes. “Running progression results from these forces pushing behind the center of gravity of the body.…”
the heel was needed only for standing, not motion.
Bowerman’s marketing was brilliant. “The same man created a market for a product and then created the product itself,”
the foot action contains no hint of pronation or supination,” Lydiard complained. “Those sideways flexings of the ankles begin only when people lace themselves into these running shoes because the construction of many of the shoes immediately alters the natural movement of the feet.
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.”
“You support an area, it gets weaker. Use it extensively, it gets stronger…. Run barefoot and you don’t have all those troubles.
instead of each foot clomping down as it would in a shoe, it behaved like an animal with a mind of its own—stretching, grasping, seeking the ground with splayed toes, gliding in for a landing like a lake-bound swan.
“We found pockets of people all over the globe who are still running barefoot, and what you find is that during propulsion and landing, they have far more range of motion in the foot and engage more of the toe. Their feet flex, spread, splay, and grip the surface, meaning you have less pronation and more distribution of pressure.”
Batopilas, an ancient mining town tucked eight thousand feet below the lip of the canyon.
Tarahumara tesgüinada—the marathon drinking party that precedes and occasionally prevents the ball races.
Anything goes at a tesgüinada, Bob explained, because everything is blamed on the peyote, moonshine tequila, and tesgüino, the potent corn beer. As wild as these parties get, they actually serve a noble and sober purpose: they act as a pressure valve to vent explosive emotions.
“Even if you don’t need it, it’s training for when you do.
huevos rancheros, the fried eggs smothered in homemade salsa and freshly chopped cilantro and sitting atop thick, hand-patted tortillas.
the ultrarunner’s creed: “If you can’t see the top, walk.”
that’s one reason ultrarunners don’t get hurt and never seem to burn out: “They know how to train, not strain.”
“Humans didn’t invent rough surfaces, Oso,” Ted said. “We invented the smooth ones.
the more Scott researched traditional endurance athletes, the more vegetarians he found.
he figured he’d trust the results first and figure out the science later.
he eschewed ibuprofen and relied instead on wolfsbane
By basing his diet on fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, Scott is deriving maximum nutrition from the lowest possible number of calories, so his body isn’t forced to carry or process any useless bulk.
carbohydrates clear the stomach faster than protein,
Vegetables, grains, and legumes contain all the amino acids necessary to build muscle from scratch.
