Does Foot Form Explain Running Injuries?
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/why-runners-get-injured/
I was a runner in high school (not a very good one, my best mile was a bit over 5 minutes and at 3 miles I was just over 18 minutes (this when competitive was just over 4 minute miles and 15 minutes for 3 miles)) and while far from diligent (I don’t think I have been diligent at anything my whole life, which probably says a lot about my personality) I did run often enough to get sore enough to stop or even injured enough to take weeks long breaks. As I got older (and fatter) I still jogged (I don’t dignify what I do with the term ‘run’ any more), but seemed to get injured more often and eventually switched to biking as a way to save my feet and knees. The last couple of years, though, I have switched back to jogging because unlike our situation where we lived in North Carolina, it really isn’t that practical to go biking from the house, thus necessitating the extra activation energy of assembling everything onto the car and driving to the destination just to start biking. Expectedly I started to have lots of pain and explored ways to ameliorate the pain. I stumbled across the idea of barefoot running and while, as the article states, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of science behind it, it seems quite clear to me that since shoes are a quite new invention by human evolution standards and that many of the best professional runners learned to run barefoot, running with shoes might indeed be a source of my ills. I have been working to switch over to running on the balls of my feet in an effort to strengthen my body for an attempt at barefoot running (I won’t actually run barefoot, but intend to get a pair of those goofy looking foot gloves so I don’t also have to produce quarter inch thick callouses). I have been finding this process is itself injurious and have pulled calf muscles and believe I have triggered plantar fasciitis, but I am planning on stubbornly persevering in the hopes that the more gentle impacts of running on the balls of my feet will make my knees less painful going forward. One of the other benefits mentioned by the proponents of barefoot running is by having a better sense of the actual terrain under your foot you are a bit less likely to turn your ankle as well. I have noted myself many times when I turn an ankle that I really didn’t have any sense of the uneven ground under my foot at the instant I started to apply pressure, so I suspect that idea might have merit as well. The above article, though, isn’t about barefoot running, it is about running on the balls of your feet and how it seems to reduce the potential for injury, so it would seem that my approach might have some efficacy even if I never get to the foot glove stage
