The Macro Effects of Shoe Support On Our Speed
So I'm re-reading Chris McDougall's Born To Run, and I'm at a point where he's talking about how The United States used to be competitive in the global distance running circuit. He writes, "Slice the top off a '70s running shoe, and you had a sandal: the old Adidas' and Onitsuka Tigers were just a flat sole and laces, with no motion control, no arch support, no heel pad. The guys in the '70s didn't know enough to worry about "pronation" and "supination"; that fancy running-store jargon hadn't even been invented yet. Their training was as primitive as their shoes. They ran way too much: "we ran twice a day, sometimes three times," Frank Shorter would recall. "All we did was run -- run, eat, and sleep." By the early '80s, the Greater Boston Track Club had half a dozen guys who could run a 2:12 marathon. That's six guys, in one amateur club, in once city. Twenty years later, you couldn't find a single 2:12 marathoner anywhere in the country. The United States couldn't even get one runner to meet the 2:14 qualifying standard for the 2000 Olympics; only Rod DeHaven squeaked into the games under the 2:15 "B" standard. He finished sixty-ninth."
In the pages leading up to this passage, McDougall talks about how the Russians used to train their track stars by not allowing them to run a lap until they could jump from a 20' ladder barefoot without being injured. This seems pretty extreme to me, but the point is the same -- in order to be the best runner you can be, you need to utilize your body's natural mechanics, and it seems as though today's footwear does a lot to prevent that. The large point of McDougall's book is that anybody could be an excellent runner, but that today's footwear gets in our way. Think about it; you've probably been in shoes longer than you've been walking. Imagine how naturally developed your feet and legs would be had you spent all that time in footwear that wasn't manipulating the way your body interacted with the ground. So by the time anybody has decided they want to take up a hobby in running, or even if they just want to use running as a way to become more healthy and lose weight, they're ill-prepared in what would have otherwise been their most innately supportive attribute: their feet and legs simply aren't developed to do what they're supposed to do. The issue here is that you need to be training often before your body can build the muscles you've been ignoring your entire life, and building those muscles from scratch is a long and careful process that many decide to cut the corners on by simply buying the shoes that caused their problems to begin with -- the shoes that essentially act to artificially do what your body could do on its own. The most unfortunate thing, is that by the time anybody realizes this, it's too late -- they're already a decade or two, or three, or four behind. That's not to say you can't get there, because you can. I did. It is an unfortunate downward, self-fulfilling spiral in our society, though.