No, not the Bruce Springsteen album or song, but the book by Christopher McDougall chronicling his journeys among ultramarathoners, a native Mexican tribe of (seemingly) superathletes, and his own running pain. The main point of the book is: everything you know about running is wrong. Specifically, shoes. All that padding and stability and motion control just gets in the way of the natural sensory feedback your feet give you when you run barefoot, leading to bad running form and eventually, for most people, injuries. To put it bluntly, the shoes are indirectly causing the very injuries they're supposed to be preventing.
I have been running more or less regularly since the fall of 2000, when my wife and I found out we were expecting our first child. At the time I didn't lead an unhealthy lifestyle exactly, but I wasn't getting a great deal of exercise either, and if I wanted to be around to see this kid grow up, I needed to take better care of myself. I joined a gym, started on cardio machines, transitioned to treadmill running and outside running. I ran my first Peachtree Road Race in 2002 and did quite a few races over the next few years, mostly 10Ks but also a few 5Ks and one half-marathon. Some nagging injuries led me to give up running for a couple of years, but I found I really missed it so I made the effort to start up again in 2010 - about the time I learned about Born To Run. The book was a revelation, and made a lot of sense to me - after all, humans have been running barefoot for thousands of years - do we really need expensive, high-tech shoes to keep from injuring ourselves? I tried some barefoot running but the bigger impact (no pun intended) on my running came in the form of some more minimalist shoes and more careful attention to my form.
McDougall's book talks a good bit about correcting your running form, as merely taking off your shoes isn't enough. Most of us need to unlearn years of bad habits, such as landing on your heels, developed from running in highly-cushioned shoes. Correcting one's running form isn't easy, even for McDougall, who had the benefit of some of the best running coaches around. I found some YouTube videos and other sites which helped, but I wasn't sure I was on the right track. I felt like I needed some coaching, but I'm basically too cheap to hire a personal trainer; plus, all this barefoot/minimalist running stuff, as trendy as it was, was still new, and I doubted that there was an abundance of coaches out there who knew what they were talking about.
Fortunately, the good folks at Big Peach started to offer Good Form Running classes for a modest fee. This technique, very much in line with the barefoot running craze, divides running form into four areas: posture, mid-foot landing, cadence, and lean. Breaking it down like this lets you work on one thing at a time. The cadence part is particularly simple: aim for 180 strides per minute, or 90 per minute on each foot, which will give you a shorter, more efficient stride, while at the same time discouraging you from landing on your heels. I had known about the 180 strides per minute guideline for some time, and briefly tried running with a metronome, but I wasn't crazy about it. However, the class suggested running with an iPod playlist consisting of songs with tempos at 90 or 180 beats per minute. I hadn't thought about doing this before, but it made a lot of sense for me - I run with an iPod Nano (although usually listening to podcasts), and I have a lot of music in iTunes. Surely some fraction of the thousands of songs were at the correct tempo, right?
In the next post I'll discuss my efforts at putting together a playlist of suitable songs.
