Later On

James Fallows discovers that his preferred running style (a style I think of as sprinting: running on the balls of your feet) is the right way to go. His post begins:

For lo these many decades of several-times-per-week running, I have favored the "land on the front of your feet" policy. This is the way you naturally run if you’re sprinting — up on the balls of the feet — and it is the way that has always felt most comfortable to me. But it is at odds with prevailing "heel-strike" practice, and it makes me wonder about standard running shoes, with their enormous multi-inch layers of padding at the back, under the heel, where I need it least. My shoes typically wear out when the area at the front of the shoe, under the balls of my feet, is all abraded away, and the big, thick rear cushions still look new.

Now, science weighs in to say that I’ve been doing it right all along! Or, more specifically Nature weighs in, with a report today here saying that fore-foot running, which also turns out to be the way people naturally run if they’re barefoot, is fundamentally much easier on your joints and bones and therefore easier to bear over the years. There’s a six-minute video on the topic here, which has a variety of "actual scientific" stress-diagrams, like the ones below, showing how the decelerative shock of landing is buffered and spread out over time by fore-foot landings.

Observe the sharp, vertical impact spike from a heel landing (straight-up line with two red circles): …

Continue reading.