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To Tracy,
who continually inspires me to never settle for less than my best strides and who has always taken the journey with me
On a late-summer evening in 1999, I attended my first European professional track meet in Brussels, Belgium. I remember the setting sun slanting through the roof, the roar of the crowds, and the thrill of watching some of the best in the sport race. But what I remember most were the Kenyan steeplechasers.
As that event approached, several European and American runners were warming up, running along the track and taking the hurdles in typical fashion: jumping up, lightly touching the top, and pushing off. The athletes looked fit and comfortable with the challenges of the event, far more than I would be with tackling the high, sturdy hurdles of the 3,000-meter race.
Then a group of tall, thin Kenyan runners emerged. They floated along the track as if they didn’t need to touch the ground, bounding over the hurdles effortlessly, like a herd of deer crossing a fence. They seemed to move in a different way than even the other world-class runners in the event. I watched in wonder at the ease with which they ran as much as at their dominance of the race.
Five years later, I was back in Brussels for the World Cross Country Championships. As competitors from around the world struggled through laps of a muddy field, one runner, Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopia, floated in front, comfortably winning both the long (12K) and short (4K) race. More than just fitter and faster, he seemed to defy both gravity and the challenging footing of the terrain. His feet brushed the ground lightly. He accelerated smoothly and effortlessly, on demand, his legs spinning beneath a seemingly weightless body.
I’ve been a runner since my freshman year of high school, way back in 1977. I’ve had moderate success and stayed relatively injury-free. But as I watched the world’s best runners, in Brussels and elsewhere, I felt like I did something entirely different than them. Instead of floating, I muscled my body along, pounding the ground and working for each forward push. Photos of me midmarathon looked like I was racewalking, particularly compared to someone like Bekele or road and cross-country champion Lornah Kiplagat, whom I watched on video and tried to emulate—with little success.
Something else that caught my attention in Brussels in 2004: A blond Australian, Benita Johnson, won the women’s long race over the heavily favored African runners. When I interviewed her afterward, she talked about growing up barefoot.
“I rarely wore shoes as a child,” she told me the day after her surprise victory. “I grew up in the small coastal town of Mackay in Queensland, between Brisbane and Cairns. We lived outside of town, and until I went to high school in town at 13, I never even wore shoes to school. I had two brothers and one sister and we were very active; every day we were involved in sporting activities. We used to run up the sand hills on the shore—short sprints, maybe 30 seconds up the hills—then down into the ocean, then back up again.”
Johnson’s revelation added to my growing fascination with barefoot running. After a trip to Kenya in 2007—where I saw the fabled children running to school and at play, barefoot, free, light, and fast—I was more convinced that there was something important going on here.
I was not alone. Within the next 5 years, the entire running world became infatuated with barefoot or minimalist running. The answer, it seemed, to the question of why some runners move lightly and some plod along was to be found by paying attention to the feet.
Minimalism made sense to me. While I never became a raving barefooter, I ran barefoot strides and had the kids I coached running them. I focused on trying to land on my midfoot or forefoot and to keep my stride under my center of gravity.
Nike came out with their Free model in 2004, and they became part of my regular rotation of trainers. I tried on my first Vibram FiveFingers shoe at the 2007 Boston Marathon and started doing some training in them. I upped my use of the Vibrams after meeting Tony Post, then president and CEO of Vibram USA, at a conference in Austin, Texas, called The Running Event. One morning at the group trail run, Post, who is a solidly built, athletic man, was running comfortably in his FiveFingers. I fell in beside him, and we talked about his experience in the shoes for several miles. He was the first person I had met who treated them as running footwear, not as a training tool. Even taking into account his vested interest in broadening the shoe’s appeal, Post was a true believer and a convincing advocate.
The minimalist shoes did seem to help me run quieter and lighter, although my stride and my familiar aches and pains remained largely unchanged. I particularly had troubles in my hips, hamstrings, and sacroiliac joint (tailbone).
By 2009 I ran a road 5K in a pair of Vibram FiveFingers Bikilas. Although I ran comfortably and fast in them, interestingly, a photo from the finish line of that race shows me with my forward foot toe up, about to touch down on my heel. It seemed that the shoes hadn’t changed my stride much. And, while I advocated for “less shoe” among the high school runners I coached, I found that some could run well in minimal shoes but others would get hurt and instead ran better in more stable or more cushioned footwear.
Such was the experience of many, it turned out. While minimalism promised to deliver a new stride, wearing these shoes or no shoes only seemed to signal where changes were necessary. In Running Times, we published stories like “Are You Ready for Minimal?”—an assessment of the mobility, balance, and strengths you needed to run well in less shoe. We repeatedly reminded people of the need for time to adapt to the new mechanics.
But runners began to question the need to adapt, particularly when the new shoes didn’t prevent injury but instead introduced different ones (like the metatarsal stress fracture I suffered in 2011 after doing considerable training in spikes and minimalist shoes). With the 2012 class-action lawsuit against Vibram, related to false claims in advertising that the shoes could reduce foot injuries and strengthen foot muscles, the tide had completely turned. After lifting the hero of minimalism (Vibram) onto a godlike pedestal, the running world dragged it to the edge of town and stoned it to death. More than 150,000—claimants for a piece of the Vibram settlement—threw stones. The minimalist movement was dead.
As shoe companies began to go back to more cushioned and more controlling shoes, and minimalism became a dirty word, one question hung out there unanswered, “How should we then run?” Throwing out our shoes (or at least our heel lifts and medial posts) may not be the answer, but we seemed to have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Minimalism had gone too far—becoming a religion with rules and levels of commitment— and it had offered the wrong solution: different shoes. But at its core was the idea that we could run better.
It was in this context, in the fall of 2013, that I set out to discover if, in a postminimalist world, I could find any consensus among athletes, coaches, physical therapists, podiatrists, biomechanists, and form gurus about what is good form and how to improve it.
For 3 months, I immersed myself in research about running form. Every other day I spoke with another expert. I read research reports, articles, and books. And I tried out everything I heard and read. The result in the magazine was a feature story called, “It’s All in the Hips.”
The result for me was learning more about how I move than I had in my previous 50 years. I learned how far off balance my default posture was and marveled at how tall and comfortable I felt in “neutral.” I found myself correcting my balance any time I was standing and began playing with what coach Bobby McGee calls “dynamic balance,” leaning out from neutral so that I needed force under my toes to stay upright. From there I learned to fall into motion effortlessly, rather than reaching a leg out and pulling myself forward.
I felt the rotation necessary to get my hips in neutral after doing one of the tests recommended by Jay Dicharry, biomechanics researcher, physical therapist, and director of the REP Biomechanics Lab in Bend, Oregon—a test, incidentally, that had appeared in the magazine before, but I confess I had never tried, not thinking I had to work on posture. I learned how to do a squat properly for the first time, feeling it all in my butt, not in my quads and knees.
At The Running Event conference in Austin that December, I was kicked in the butt—repeatedly—by exercise therapist/rehab specialist Laura Bergmann as she tried to get me in the proper position to do a side-leg lift. When she did, I felt the correct muscles working for the first time and realized I had never worked them properly.
I watched the video of Robby Andrews winning the 2011 NCAA 800-meter race and noted, as Dicharry pointed out, how most of the field rotated their pelvis and arched their back as they fatigued, and how the three who didn’t medaled. I started noting hip position changing with fatigue in other runners—and in me.
Using coach Tom Miller’s posture bar, a PVC pipe, I felt how far back my arms should be driving behind my torso. Then I needed Bergmann’s help to open up my shoulders in order to swing freely in that posture and to keep my arms driving back that far during my runs.
One day, during a 400-meter repeat, things came together.
As I crested the slight grade on the dirt road and pushed toward the clump of bushes that marked the finish of that segment, I noticed something different. Usually I’d start to wallow in the effort at this point, my legs feeling like Silly Putty as they dragged the dead weight of my torso through the final meters. This day, however, my legs were spinning in a perfect, powerful gear. My hips felt locked in, stable, and connected, transferring energy seamlessly to my spine like a well-tuned carbon-fiber bike frame. My body felt compact, balanced, and flying. I didn’t have to flail and strive to finish the repeat—all I had to do was maintain my turnover.
It was what Rob Conenello, DPM, sports podiatrist, runner, and form expert, calls the “aha moment”—the instant it clicks and you feel for yourself what people like Conenello are talking about in terms of posture, hip rotation, hip extension, glute activation, and other elements of an effective stride.
What surprised me, given my years of running, was how much I didn’t know and how much I could still improve. True, I’ve known that I wasn’t like Kenenisa, but I’ve had a form that works well enough to have run, quite successfully, for a lifetime.
I’ve always seen myself as a smooth, efficient runner. How did I get to this point without knowing how to really use my glutes? One consolation came from seeing that even runners in top groups, runners of the caliber of Deena Kastor, Meb Keflezighi, and Mo Farah have to continually work on improving how they move.
More than that, however, I began to see that the process of having good form, or more accurately, of moving more effectively, is not something you are born being able to do or not do, nor is it simply a matter of good or bad movement habits like how your foot lands. Running well requires an effective range of motion in your limbs and specific strengths. Most of the habits of our day-to-day lives work against us in these areas, limiting our mobility, balance, and appropriate strength, to the extent that whole muscle groups get shut off and we lose the ability to move the way we did when we were 3 or 4 years old.
There are many reasons African runners move so beautifully and powerfully. One big one stems from their upbringing and lifestyle. In a country without the “conveniences” we take for granted, they walk and run for transportation, stand more than they sit, and work and play in highly physical ways as a daily part of life: carrying tools, groceries, or whatever they need to transport; hoeing gardens; building by hand; squatting; playing soccer; and not sitting in a chair hunched over a computer when not wrapped around a smartphone.
My experience is, of course, only the experiment of one, but I can report that learning to feel the position of my hips, activate my glutes, and play with my balance has transformed how I move. I feel better while running and all day long. My running has been smoother, easier, and injury-free, even with increased miles and as a master. After last year’s Fourth of July race I wrote down, “One of the easiest 5Ks muscularly I can remember.” A year later, I ran an age-graded PR, feeling smoother than ever. At an international group trail run, where I was one of the oldest participants, I was pleased to be told I had a light, bouncy stride.
I keep learning not only how much I need to continue working at the elements I focused on in 2013, but also how other parts of my body are affected by 21st century lifestyles and conveniences—shoulders, neck, feet. I jumped into a treadmill video analysis at a conference in December 2015 and discovered that I still needed work in all the same areas of posture, hips, shoulders, and over-striding. I’m coming to peace with the fact that this isn’t something I can focus on once and have solved. I need to incorporate habitual corrective exercises into my daily routines or else lose—all too quickly—the gains I’ve made.
I know improving my form hasn’t worked and won’t work magic: I still have to do the miles, the hills, and the speed work to get fit enough to race well. And it requires fairly constant mindfulness, which can mess with the relaxing, therapeutic side of running. But it has been worth it to feel lighter, smoother, and younger—not to mention pain-free—on the run.
This book is a compilation of what I’ve learned. Little to none of it is original—it draws from the expertise of many scientists, physicians, and coaches—but I hope the presentation and organization in this format will help you to pay attention, understand better how and why you move the way you do, incorporate new habits into your routine, and, in the end, run easier and better.
Your running style is much like your voice. Every person has a distinct sound based on his or her physical characteristics, habits, and upbringing. Most people don’t think much about how their voice sounds, know what makes it sound that way, or have any clue how to change it if they wanted to.
Some voices are high-pitched, while others are deep. Some voices have a nasal overtone, maybe only temporarily because of a cold, or maybe more permanently out of habit or the shape of throat and nasal passages. Some have accents, based on early influences; one might linger on long vowels, while another might clip or roll his or her r’s. As long as we can communicate, each voice works.
There are times, however, when you need to pay attention to your voice. If your speech pattern varies so far from the norm that it can’t be understood, you need to change it. You need speech therapy or an accent-reduction class, where you’ll learn more about how the throat, tongue, and lips form sounds and how you can alter them. And you’ll practice new patterns until they become reproducible and, eventually, your new habit.
Alternatively, if you want to excel with your voice, such as using it to be a singer, public speaker, actor, or broadcaster, you will likely need to work to make it more effective. Some just want to get a bit better, like learning to project to perform in the school play. Some make it their profession: Entire university degrees are based upon improving the quality and effectiveness of your voice. You can buy books, get instructional DVDs, and hire coaches to help you sound better for your chosen field.
Similarly, every runner has a stride signature based around his or her unique characteristics. It usually develops without thought or training, and most people don’t think about how it looks, why it works the way it does, or how to change it. When they are ready to run, they are able to run.
As with a voice that doesn’t communicate, however, runners need to change their stride if it doesn’t function properly. Runners who are chronically injured need to figure out why. Athlete, coach, and assistant professor of kinesiology at Southeastern Louisiana University Ryan Green, PhD, says, “Bad running injures people. Our bodies have the capacity to run healthy.”
“If you are running well without injury or problem, then why fix something that isn’t broken?” says Harvard professor and running movement researcher Daniel Lieberman, PhD. “But if you are getting injured on a regular basis, why wouldn’t you look at your form? Sometimes injuries are the result of simply too much too fast, and thus not allowing the body to adapt. Sometimes they are caused by weaknesses (e.g., weak abductors), but sometimes they are caused by poor running form.”
Lieberman points out that tibial stress syndrome, which starts as shin splints, is caused by the impact stresses of overstriding. The pain of shin splints is a signal that you are doing something wrong. “Rather than treat the symptom, why not fix the problem? That involves changing one’s form.”
Sometimes you may want to fix something before it breaks. “You can run with crappy form for a very long time,” says mobility expert Brad Cox. But if you start to increase your miles, want to get faster, or simply are getting older, ineffective mechanics can start to haunt you. “Most people only use pain as a reason that they start looking for anything else,” Cox says. Before the pain, he recommends that you need to check on your mechanics and mobility regularly.
Thinking this way leads to a second reason to consider form. Like the opera singer or network anchor who spends years tuning her voice, runners who want to be their best leave no stone unturned, including their form, even if they function fairly well now. “Running is a skill,” says Lieberman. “Learning a skill means training one’s motor patterns.” Elite runners work on every element of this skill every day.
“I think every runner should be concerned with form,” says Scott Simmons, coach of the American Distance Project. He clarifies, though, that it is not about changing to match a certain ideal, but about paying attention to biomechanics, “trying to identify an individual’s inefficiencies with mobility, range of motion, specific strength, and symmetry.”
Over the years of covering top athletes as editor in chief of Running Times, I increasingly learned that all of them—from high school champions to world record holders—don’t rely simply on running to build their dominance. While you’ll rarely find a Kenyan or Ethiopian runner inside a weight room, you will see them doing extensive drills and ancillary exercises to improve their strength, agility, explosive power, and speed. The same is true if you visit a collegiate practice or drop in on an elite marathoner like Shalane Flanagan or Meb Keflezighi.
You may wonder why I’m talking about weights and drills; isn’t this a book on form? I’m sorry to tell you that most of what is recommended in the pages to come involves work—stretches, exercises, foam rolling, and more—not simply cuing new patterns or changing your shoes.
I won’t overpromise anything. Focusing on form takes effort and time—there are no simple, quick fixes that will magically make you better. And progress may not be very visible. But the outcome, says Irish performance scientist John Kiely, is that “you will be a more robust athlete. More resilient.” Being a more resilient runner will allow you to run longer and train harder, with less risk of injury.
You may find this book useful if:
•You want to run more smoothly and effectively.
•You have tried and failed to change your stride or are not interested in adopting a new stride pattern based on some sort of “ideal” form.
•You have reached a performance plateau and would like to find ways to become faster and more efficient.
•You have small but persistent injuries or pains associated with running that have not been cured by traditional medicine or changes in shoes.
•You have pains that appear when you reach a certain volume of training, no matter how gradually you ramp up to it.
•You are getting older—either old enough to start feeling the effects of imbalances and lack of mobility, or old enough to know that you will run into problems someday soon and you want to extend your running life.
•You are confused by all the talk about form retraining—particularly now that minimalism has been largely abandoned and research gives us seemingly contradictory information about shoes, stride, injuries, and performance.
•You want to learn more about how your body works so you can better assess and optimize your form during running.
Plus:
•Like most of us in the modern world, you live in a society where walking or running is not the primary form of transportation.
•You spend the majority of your daily hours sitting: at a desk, driving, in a living room watching TV, or reading. You rarely perform physical labor that involves your whole body: lifting, pushing, bending, or reaching.
You probably don’t need the book if:
•You live in a rural setting in a developing country like Kenya and have maintained a traditional, preindustrial lifestyle since youth.
•You run pain-free, at the pace you want to, and are not getting older.
Any runner who dives into the subject of running form quickly finds it is a thorny topic. Looking for simple advice, you discover opposing camps, separated not just by nuances like scheduling or selection of workouts, but in their beliefs regarding what is true and how we should then live. That sounds almost religious, and it can often feel that way, with different groups taking on the fervor of cults, complete with gurus, tenets of belief, and unique rituals.
Different camps exist, and thrive, because we don’t know enough to prove one is true. Research is often limited and contradictory. Every camp can produce testimonials of how its program saved this or that individual’s running life. And each also has detractors who failed to reach the promised land. It is therefore left to each runner to find what works for her or him—and different runners find success with different approaches.
We do know enough, however, to dispel two persistent myths. One is that there exists a perfect running form that we all should emulate. The other, opposite, myth is that however we move is just the way we are—by birth, upbringing, or both—and nothing we do can change that. These two myths are not exclusive. Many believe both: that there is a perfect form but they weren’t gifted with it and can’t do anything about it.
These myths tend to demoralize and paralyze runners. Trying to emulate Kenenisa Bekele’s form, or whatever is perceived as “perfection,” more often than not fails. Even if you are successful at changing your habits, it often doesn’t make you faster, smoother, or injury-free.
Believing that you were born a certain way robs you of any incentive to improve. “That’s just the way I am,” is the only possible response, for better or worse. With that outlook, all you can do is accept your limitations, train to become fitter, and try to find shoes that fit your stride type and support your weaknesses. The idea that shoes can solve all ills is a third, perhaps even more pervasive, myth that I’ll take up later in the book.
These myths are persistent because they all hold a bit of truth.
It’s easy to see the logic of those who argue for a perfect form: If humans are meant to run, there must be a natural, optimal way to do it. We all have the same parts. We’re all fighting the same forces of gravity, friction, and wind resistance.
Where should we look to find what that form looks like? An obvious place would seem to be those who run faster over distance than anyone else in the world today: the East Africans.
If you stand on the side of Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts, on the third Monday in April you can watch the world’s best runners go by. After 22 miles they are still flowing quickly down the road, moving lightly and smoothly, with a spring in their step.
Compare these runners to the rest of the pack, and you’ll see that those up front share several elements of form, whereas the form of those behind falls apart in various ways. To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy’s quote about families: All good runners resemble one another; each inefficient runner is inefficient in his or her own way. If we could run exactly like those frontrunners, it seems obvious that we would move faster, smoother, and more efficiently. That is a big if, for many reasons.
Look more closely at that lead pack and you’ll note that, despite the shared effortlessness, each of these very efficient runners has his or her own unique style. Each has individual movement patterns that create a running signature. It may be a head bob, one arm that swings wide, or feet that pinwheel at the back of the stride.
We’ve all seen these signatures before. If I am meeting a running friend in a busy venue like New York’s Central Park or Boston’s Charles River, or if I’m watching for someone in the throng of a marathon field, I don’t need to wait to see facial features to recognize him or her. A runner’s stride identifies him from a mile away, even amid a sea of other runners.
In 2012, Brigham Young University biomechanist Iain Hunter, PhD, closely examined the foot strike of runners in the Olympic Trials and found a wide variety in their landing location and angles. Even these, the best runners in the country, running on a track—a perfectly groomed surface conducive to a machine-like consistency—differed significantly from one another.
Former Olympian and coach Lee Troop isn’t at all surprised. “No one is born with a 100 percent perfect body,” Troop says. “Every one of us has some deficiency somewhere. As we grow and morph, our bodies become accustomed to it. If you look at the Olympic [Marathon] start, you see 100 different runners that all have different form, different styles.”
John Kiely, senior lecturer in Elite Performance at the Institute of Coaching and Performance, University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom, explains that this variability is part of the genius of the human body. Unlike a machine, made of identical parts moving in identical pathways, our bodies are each different from one another and even variable individually: No one is perfectly symmetrical.
“Multiple dimensions of running architecture—snugness of bones within sockets, springiness of tendons, rigidity of feet, geometry of muscles—differ between individuals, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically,” Kiely explains. “There is a right template for you. There isn’t a right template for all of us.”
Rather than trying to follow one path, like a machine would, and failing to perform because of these anomalies, the body instead adapts its movement patterns to optimize the pathways its own architecture allows. Kiely says, “We learn to run in ways that accommodate these mismatched parts, thanks to a pervasive aspect of human biology: plasticity, our capacity to reshape neural and biological structures in response to repeated practice.”
In other words, the way we each learn to run is unique to our specific bodies. Sports podiatrist and runner Paul Langer, DPM, says, “Every person has a unique movement pattern, so you can’t really make blanket statements about what is bad running form or good running form for any given person. You really can’t try to get everybody to run the same.”
Your body not only creates your own style, but it also optimizes that style to use the least amount of energy. University of Calgary biomechanist Benno Nigg, PhD, calls the resulting pattern your “preferred movement path.” In studies, Nigg and colleagues found that most runners will maintain this preferred path even when wearing shoes or inserts designed to alter or control the motion of their stride. Other studies, ranging from the 1982 work of early running researcher Peter Cavanagh, PhD, on self-chosen stride lengths published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, to a 2005 study at Colorado State University on an attempt to retrain runners’ gait, show that runners tend to be most efficient using this “preferred pattern.”
“Mammals move in a way that is both metabolically efficient and least painful,” says Langer. “Anything that deviates from that preferred movement pattern increases metabolic costs.” Langer and fellow podiatrist Rob Conenello, DPM, say that unless a runner is having difficulties, they don’t advise trying to change his or her form to match a preconceived ideal.
“I think it’s important to recognize that everyone has a fairly unique ‘movement signature,’” says David McHenry, DPT, a physical therapist and strength coach for elite runners including athletes at Nike’s Oregon Project. “I think a goal of changing form is first starting with the realization that the further away from their natural movement signature you are trying to take someone, the more unlikely you will make the sustainable change that you are going for.”
McHenry cites Mo Farah and Galen Rupp, two runners he has worked with, as examples. “Both are clearly two of the best and most consistent distance runners in the world over the past 4 years,” McHenry says. “And both have very different running styles. We don’t try to make Mo run like Galen and [we] don’t try to make Galen run like Mo.”
The way we run is unique to our bodies and our experience. I can no more run like Kenenisa Bekele than he could run like me (not that he would want to). Bottom line: There is no “perfect” form, no “one-size-fits-all” recommendation.
But if stride is ingrained and personal—if it not only can’t be changed but also shouldn’t be messed with—what is the purpose of this book?