Minimal Running Shoes

I run in minimal shoes. Minimal shoes are extremely light, have little or no drop-off from the heel to mid-foot, and almost forces you to adopt an ideal running form in order to wear them without getting hurt. 

Most runners cannot wear minimal shoes unless they have an efficient mid-foot strike, which for most people feels unnatural. I used to be a heel-striker, which applies to many runners. The problem with a heel strike is it often leads to the most common running injuries, such as strained calves, runner's knee, achille's strains, plantar fasciitis, lower back strain and...just about everything bad about running. After crapping out in the Boston Marathon in 2005, mainly due to excessive heat on race day and a range of injuries caused by an inefficient heel strike, I decided I needed to make changes in my approach to running. 

I was fortunate to have happened upon a new method of running based on Tai Chi. In fact, it's call Chi Running, which you probably heard of if you're a runner. Danny Dreyer, the inventor of Chi Running promises the holy grail of benefits for Chi runners: no injuries, greater endurance, more speed. Get the details here at the website. I'm a true believer in Chi, since I've been able to avoid running injuries for the past 8 years, though I don't think it has had much of an impact on my endurance or speed. (Full disclosure: I've been having some annoying knee problems over the past year, but that was mainly cased to a structural issue in my back and unaligned hips, not due to running form.) 

This is a windy way of getting back to minimal shoes. Chi Running espouses using a mid-foot strike and generating motion not from toe-ing off, but from a slight forward lean and with the idea to avoid using your legs at all for propulsion. It's a complex process to learn, but it saved my running career, as it is. But bottom line, if you want to go minimal, you need a mid-foot strike and the best way to develop that, in my opinion, is becoming a Chi runner.

Any Chi runners out there? 

The Running Habit

Judging by the hits on this blog, lotsa of people seem interested in the topic of running. So, this is addressed to non-runners. At least non-runners who want to become runners. Good for you. Running is great--it benefits your health, both physical and mental, provides the "me" time lacking in most of our lives, is a great way to make friends if that's a hot button for you, and you get to wear really neat clothes and shoes. We'll ignore the potential down-sides for now, as I nurse some overuse injuries as I train for next month's Big Sur Marathon.

So how do you form the running habit? Easy, start slow, build up gradually, and do it at a set time. Starting slow is essential. When you're starting to run, you should never be out of breath, because then it becomes a strain and you end up wiped out.  And when you are wiped out you get discouraged and then you quit. Once you can handle a quarter of a mile or half a mile, build up very slowly. Build up too fast and you'll get wiped out, or injured. Then you'll quit.

And do it at the same time every day. Make it become a habit. Running is exercise and for most of us, exercise is work, not fun. You have to force yourself to do it. So don't think about when you'll do it or where. Make it automatic. Have a set route for the first few months and do it the same time of the day, whether it's morning, afternoon, or night. Whether you go out every day or every other day. Make it a routine. After a while, it will become ingrained in your lifestyle and when you skip a day, you'll miss it. That's when you know you have a running habit.

And that's a great thing. I see a 5k race down the road for you. 

CRIMEA DOESN'T MATTER

When it comes to Crimea’s annexation by Russia, the world reaction appears to be a collective shrug. Despite rumblings from some quarters of a nascent resumption of the Cold War, the best gauge of panic and discomfiture, the stock market, paused briefly before resuming its upward glide. 

Sure, world leaders from the euro zone and the U.S. tossed tantrums to varying degrees—but only because it was expected of them. No one likes to go through the trouble of redrawing maps and realigning allegiances. Of course the Republicans used the occasion, as they do all occasions, to dump on the current administration for perceived weakness and other shortcomings. 

But taken as a whole, the Crimean situation is a blip just short of a distraction. The facts on the ground seem pretty clear: the Crimeans have historically identified themselves as a limb of Mother Russia, with no particular affinity with the Ukrainian culture. Plus, Russia has deeper pockets to support the relatively impecunious state of Crimea—a place of meager industry and natural resources. 

No, the consensus is that Crimea is a purely local issue, not something to get your shorts twisted in a knot over. And don’t get me started on the saber-rattlers in Congress who intone the second coming of the Soviet Union—as goes Crimea, so goes Ukraine…and Belarus…and Poland…and GERMANY!!!! 

Try as he might, the Putin dream of a reconstituted USSR is futile at best—the ruble is in the dumper, the energy advantage is gradually dissipating as new sources of production are developed in Asia and North America. And Mother Russia, with its dysfunctional oligarchy and rampant corruption, really has nothing else to hang its hat on. 

Magical Multi-Linguists

I recently picked up a pair of eyeglasses at the local optometrist and was amazed by the administrative staff as they effortlessly shifted from English to Portuguese to Spanish and, in one instance, to Russian in the course of their customer interactions. 

I was surrounded by polyglots. This ability to speak more than one language mesmerizes me, since English is my one and only language. I struggled with two years of Latin in high school and three years of French in college, yet still felt unmoored and linguistically helpless in my two trips to France a few years ago. I’ve always believed that learning multiple tongues, or just even one other than your native language, is a sign of higher intelligence, or at least a different type of intelligence.

My mastery of English is fairly strong—why can’t that “translate” across different tongues? I know people who pick up languages like dog hair on a sweater—so what’s the trick—is it just a knack available to certain brain types? Now, according to this website http://www.fluentin3months.com/how-to-become-a-polyglot/, polyglot-ism is actually the norm rather than the exception in different parts of the world, so I must be wrong about the difficulty of learning a new language. I don’t do much international travel, but when I have visited other countries, I feel a little guilty that I can’t communicate in the local patois and instead depend on the English-speaking skills of the natives. 

I’m not particularly adept at the STEM disciplines, but I can sooner hold my own in the sciences and math than in the linguistic arena. Is there any hope for me, at age 60, to conquer a language that is not English?

Do Today’s Pitchers Break Too Easily?

As a New York area baseball fan, I find it particularly frustrating how young pitchers are babied by organizations in an often futile attempt to preserve their arms. Such things as pitch counts, innings counts, late-season shut-downs and the like. I’m thinking of the so-called “Joba” rules, when the Yankees were nurturing Joba Chamberlain when he was lighting things up as a young gun five years ago. 

The minute you get to like a young pitcher like a Joba or a Harvey or a Wheeler on the Mets, and a Strasburg, on the Washington Nationals, the teams shut them down to “save” their arms and avoid a potential flame-out. Yet Joba and Harvey and Strasburg still ended up with major arm surgery, despite the delicate handling. So why the innings limitations? Doesn’t seem to work, in my opinion.

But then my judgment is skewed by flawed images of the past, when pitchers like Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Satchel Paige, Bob Gibson, Nolan Ryan, Don Drysdale and many others pitched 250+ innings year after year. In four-man rotations, not five. Makes one consider if the more you work a pitcher, the better they get. But then I found this article that seems to have solved the mystery for me.

It seems that it has always been thus. Even in the old-timey days, pitchers flamed out constantly—with an attrition rate probably worse than it is today. For every iron man like Walter Johnson or Cy Young, there were dozens of Dizzy Deans and Herb Scores and Brandon Webbs, who were done in their late 20s.

But I still think the obsession with pitch counts has less to do with a pitcher’s longevity than good genes and flawless mechanics. The one saving grace is that today’s training and surgical solutions help rescue many more careers than in years past. But, gee, can’t we have a bit more than 150 innings out of Zack Wheeler or Noah Syndergaard this year? Please?

ON RUNNING

ON RUNNING

So maybe you live in the frigid U.S. Northeast or the Midwest in this, the most miserable winter in the history of mankind, and you’re slipping and sliding in your car and there up ahead you see some idiot swaddled in layers of Spandex and fleece jogging his/her heart out in the howling wind and sub-freezing cold. And you’re saying to yourself, “How come?”

People who run tend to be obsessive. Or nuts, if you prefer. If you’re familiar with my my book, you will note that I count myself among the nuts. I’ve been running for about 30 years. While am not particularly fast, I always make sure to finish. Maybe you’re a runner, too, and can understand the mentality that causes people like us to do what we do. Because, let’s face facts:

• ·       Distance running is not a particularly exciting form of exercise, like basketball, or soccer, or football, or dance. It’s hard work and often leaves you breathless and sore.
• ·       It can be dangerous. See the example above—plus you can trip and fall or get hit by cars, trees, people on bikes, etc.
• ·       You sweat a lot and makes you smell bad.
• ·       You can get hurt—knees, ankles, hips, back, muscles, ligaments, cartilage, etc.
• ·       It’s time consuming and boring.
• ·       You could get mugged

You could also add to the list that the idea of endorphins and the “runner’s high” has never occurred in my experience—and I’ve finished nine marathons and dozens of shorter races. So there’s that. Of course many runners actually say they enjoy the act of running, of movement, but my point of view is what I enjoy the most is the stopping. Generally speaking, my post-run body is humming and I have a feeling of health and vitality.

But there are reasons people do unpleasant stuff, including running in the “teeth of inclement weather” (a lovely phrase borrowed from Dickens). I could enumerate items such as the obvious physical benefits of enhanced cardiovascular and skeletal health, weight control, improved mental outlook, and competitive release. But this is the reason I most often cite for why I run:

It’s hard. Running is hard. Running long long distances is hard. And that’s important. Because life, for most of us, is easy. My job is easy, hunting and gathering food in this age of plenty is easy, getting from one place to another is easy. I think it’s important for my psychological health and well-being to occasionally do something that’s hard—that tests or exceeds my perceived limits, both physically and intellectually. Because when you can do those things and succeed, there’s a sense of exhilaration that can be addictive. 

That’s why I occasionally read difficult books, write books of my own…and run.  Because there’s no pleasure rush like the feeling you get after finishing a marathon—or any long, difficult run. I like to think that, for me, running feeds a positive addiction. There’s much more to it than that—but this post is getting way too long, and I’ve been counseled to strive for brevity in blog posts by the “experts.”