Up and Running

After four days of no running, I finally met Patty for a "short" run at Heritage this morning.  She was trying out her new orthotics and I was trying out my foot.  I have to say that all the swimming and no running had my legs feeling a little bit wobbly.  I was telling her that in the old days, it was not recommended for runners to swim right before a running event because swimming separates the muscle fibers.  That's how it feels after swimming so much and then running.  The legs feel less stable, like jello or like spaghetti as Patty pointed out.  As of now we are planning on running this Thursday in the summer series and so no swimming for us tomorrow.  However, it would be almost two days of no running if we don't do anything tomorrow and one thing I learned from my son's racing days is that it's important to run a little bit the day before the race to keep them from stiffening up.  So we are planning on doing just a short, shady run tomorrow morning just to shake the cobwebs out of our legs.  As for the orthotics, they didn't seem to bother Patty too much and as for my foot, it only hurts when I stop so we'll have to see.  During our run I was telling Patty about an interesting study I read about regarding injuries and running shoes and their correlation.  Here's an excerpt from the article:

Over the course of three large studies, the most recent of which was published last month in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, the researchers found almost no correlation at all between wearing the proper running shoes and avoiding injury. Injury rates were high among all the runners, but they were highest among the soldiers who had received shoes designed specifically for their foot types. If anything, wearing the “right” shoes for their particular foot shape had increased trainees’ chances of being hurt.


More recently, a study published online in late June in The British Journal of Sports Medicine produced results similar to those in the military experiments, this time using experienced distance runners as subjects. For the study, 81 women were classified according to their foot postures, a more comprehensive measure of foot type than arch shape. About half of the runners received shoes designated by the shoe companies as appropriate for their particular foot stance (underpronators were given cushiony shoes, overpronators motion-control shoes and so on). The rest received shoes at random. All of the women started a 13-week, half-marathon training program. By the end, about a third had missed training days because of pain, with a majority of the hurt runners wearing shoes specifically designed for their foot postures. (It’s worth noting that across the board, motion-control shoes were the most injurious for the runners. Many overpronators, who, in theory, should have benefited from motion-control shoes, complained of pain and missed training days after wearing them, as did a number of the runners with normal feet and every single underpronating runner assigned to the motion-control shoes.)


Link to the rest of the article:
Running Shoe Research


This article kind of re-affirms my belief that there is such a thing as too much support.  Anything that restricts the natural motion of the foot can't be all that good.  What I find interesting is that we tend to naturally purchase shoes that feel right for us and should only use these "recommendations" as an afterthought.