A new way to run without injuring myself

I needed to find a new way to run without injuring myself.

A few months previously I had started working with a personal trainer, James Morris, in order to get wedding dress ready (which I succeeded magnificently at at, thanks to his training).

At this point in time, James and I had not worked at running technique, but he was a keen advocate of zero drop shoes. He had always maintained that heel striking when running was a bad move, and had been trying to coach me away from this, with limited success.

There's a movement at the moment transitioning away from cushioned heels in sports shoes due to the belief that, in the same way that a gymnast searching for stability automatically lands harder on a thicker, softer mat, we actually create more impact on our heels and up through our legs with a thicker, padded heel in our shoes. The heels of these shoes are also raised above the ball of the foot, forcing the foot into an unnatural
angle, creating a weakness in the calf and ankle, and as if this were not enough, arch supports prevent the decompression of the arch of the foot.  We all know that an arch is one of the strongest load bearing shapes there is, and the arch of our foot is a finely tuned structure to bear the load of our bodies and assist in 'springing' away from the floor.  The greater the load applied to an arch the stronger it becomes. Any engineer can tell you that if you then push up a support under the arch it looses its load bearing capacity.

So why do we do this to our feet?

Marketing.  Plain and simple.

I'm not going to go into the story of the running shoe right now, but will throw a statistic at you.  Anywhere from 65 to 80 per cent of all runners suffer an injury EVERY YEAR.

That's just a huge amount of people hurting themselves doing something we were designed to do.  But interestingly, this statistic has only become such a large percentage since Nike introduced the modern running shoe in the 70s.  Prior to this, runners wore thin rubber soled shoes, and the vast majority of common running injuries simply did not happen.

My injury-prone husband moved away from standard modern running shoes to zero-drop minimalist shoes in November 2011. Whilst I disliked the Saucony design, thinking they looked cheap and nasty, there was no mistaking that hubby had progressed from being in a situation where for months he had been unable to run a mile without his back going out or some other injury occurring, to matching my weekly distance and almost matching my speed.  His only concession to a pain free run was occasionally landing on a stone which the 3mm sole failed to protect him from, and he'd get a bit of a bruise.

Now my honeymoon was over, and I was less worried about being so toned, James and I started looking at my footfall and cadence, and with the help of some drills and his advice I really worked hard to make the transition to more of a fore-foot landing, which is supposedly far more natural, and how we run when barefoot.

There must have been something in it, as despite having not run at all for over a month before squeezing in two 5K training runs, I then entered my second Race for Life at the beginning of July, and I smashed my personal best, coming in with a time of 26 minutes and 36 seconds, and in the top 25 runners.

OK - I'm a convert.  Now I need to try out some of these minimalist shoes.