Barefoot Running
Probably some of the most nagging, injury related problems that I’ve had experience with as an athlete are foot related problems. In my second year of college, I developed a minor stress fracture in my foot that I kept trying to come back from too early. The result was an entire missed year of competition. The following two years, I learned to manage my injuries in a much more effective way so that I didn’t miss any significant meets. Most of my injury problems, though, were directly related to weaknesses in my arches, although I also had some significant issues with my knees that I battled through a good portion of last season.
It is easy for me to point a finger at one obvious factor in the cause of my problems: indoor tracks. Indoor tracks are smaller than outdoor tracks and have sharper turns, causing more stress on feet and the knees during workouts. To make matters worse, RPI’s track is not even 200 meters long, it’s a square (giving it four sharper turns instead of two more gradual turns), and it has a very hard rubber surface with almost no cushion. After workouts on that track, there was always a traffic jam in the ice bath filled with track athletes trying to ice down flared up shins, knees, ham strings and all kinds of other nagging problems. Last season, my knee problems plagued me throughout the entire indoor season, but as soon as we moved to outdoor tracks, they cleared up almost instantly. In fact, indoor tracks are so hard on the body, that many professional athletes skip the indoor season all together. Jeremy Wariner, for example, skipped his first indoor season as a professional purely for injury related concerns.
It is partially because of these injury-related experiences that I’ve had that Nike’s new shoe design is intriguing to me. I have heard of these novelties previously but this article on wired.com refreshed my interest. The new shoes, called Nike Free, are actually designed to make it feel like you are running barefoot. This may seem counterproductive and the opposite of what you would want to do to prevent injury, but ironically, it is not. The idea stems from the notion that your feet are actually biologically designed to be used without any shoes or other type of support. When you put shoes on to increase stability and cushioning, you are actually decreasing their range of motion, and therefore the muscles in the feet are underutilized. Running barefoot allows your feet greater flexibility and strengthens all muscles that are involved in the biomechanical process of running. In Nike’s research, they interviewed a track coach at Stanford that uses barefoot running as part of his training regimen:
“He said that it kept his athletes stronger and healthier, and prevented injuries,” recalls Tobie Hatfield, senior engineer for advanced products at the Nike Innovation Kitchen. “And since they were injured less, they could train more. He was sure this training was giving them an edge.”
At the end of last season we actually started to incorporate some barefoot running into our workouts. Perhaps the most beneficial and most crucial time to do that though, would be during the always dangerous indoor season.
