TheBanyanTree: learn something new every day

[Julie Anna Teague]

I went to a natural running clinic last night.  The teacher was about 
my son's age, maybe a year or two older.  He was so engaging and 
knowledgable and had the most dynamic smile (with the cutest little 
touch of bashfulness) that the whole group was instantly at ease and 
having fun with it. (What a cute kid...oh to be 22 again..oh, 
nevermind! ;)

You'd think that just being a human being would endow a person with the 
instinct to run in the most efficient way.  On the contrary, most of us 
are out there plodding and slapping and clumping around in ways that 
will most cause us pain and injury.  Even though I've been a runner for 
the better part of three and a half decades (with breaks for pain and 
injury, go figure) I have never run in the most efficient or best way.  
And I've never been to a clinic nor ever been coached to run better.  I 
thought, really, how hard can it be.  Just RUN for crying out loud.  
It's not like I had major performance goals.  I don't slap my feet 
hard, and I do some things right just from reading and trying to focus 
on what I'm doing. But I definitely spent too many years doing too many 
things the wrong way and causing myself unnecessary pain.  Like heel 
planting, which is to say I stab my heel into the ground with each 
step, jarring my whole leg and causing my knee to attempt to keep 
balance, something knee are not good at and are not designed to do.  
Knees are meant to hinge, not rotate like a shoulder or an ankle or a 
hip.  Not something I always do, and something I have been working on 
in the past couple of years anyway, but something I've certainly done 
my knee-banging share of.

We did all kinds of drills, focusing on landing on the forefoot then 
touching the heel down, which engages the calves and Achilles tendon to 
act as a spring, propelling the body forward with less energy.  Here's 
the way the teacher illustrated this point.  Put your hand flat on your 
chest and lift your pointer finger to thump your chest.  Not a lot of 
power there.  You can't thump your chest very hard.  Now take your 
other hand and pull that finger back, "loading" it like a spring, and 
then let your pointer finger go.  You can really thump yourself.  Or 
someone else, if you have someone you'd like to thump.  You get a lot 
more energy.  It was an interesting analogy and sure made his point 
more clear.

We talked about cadence, or the speed at which a runner picks her feet 
up, pulls her knees up, and place them down again.  With the same 
cadence, one can run in place, one can move ahead slowly, or one can 
move ahead very quickly.  Try it, it works, even if it seems 
counter-intuitive.  Same cadence, different speeds. Slowing the cadence 
down is another way to move ahead more slowly, but a lot of energy is 
lost in  side-to-side and up-and-down movement throughout the body.  
This is not something one wants in distance running which takes a damn 
good amount of energy anyway.  We did various drills to prove to 
ourselves how this works.  I could read it a dozen times and not 
understand the physics of the thing in a more integrated way until I 
experienced the differences.

Instead of picking up the cadence, a runner could also move forward 
more quickly by stretching out the stride length.  I always thought 
that was what I should try to do if I wanted to go faster.  But all 
kinds of bad things happen when you do that.  First, you heel plant.  
Bad for the aforementioned reasons.  Second, your foot lands way out in 
front of your center of gravity and then you body has to expend a lot 
of energy rebalancing your whole body back over your foot to regain 
your center of gravity before it can even think about forward motion.  
Also bad.  If your foot lands within your center of gravity, all your 
leg has to do is put energy into springing you forward into the next 
step.  And all those leg muscles are built for that, for contracting 
and then springing.  Spring spring spring!  Like mountain goats we were 
in our drills!  I've got some kick-ass leg muscles, but I was never 
using them to their advantage!

There were lots of other subtle changes we worked on--head position, 
arm motion, whole body lean--and more very good analogies and 
explanations for why the muscles do what they do and how they work most 
efficiently.  It was one of the most productive classes I've ever 
taken.  I learned how to do something I love doing, better.  Now to 
practice instead of plodding!

Julie