New Study: Vibram 5 Fingers' Effect on Bone Edema

I know I said today I'd talk about Chris McDougall and barefoot evangelism, but the results of a new study were released today, and I wanted to comment on that first.

The study results were reported on MSN.com and other news outlets. MSN pitched as a study that suggested minimalist runners should eschew the performance benefits of the running style, and instead should stick to traditional shoes because of the impact on the bones in their feet. This seemed off to me; barefoot running is not usually undertaken in search of better performance, but rather as a means to avoid injury and run more naturally. The same runner shod will torch his times barefoot. Of course, if wearing shoes gets him injured all the time, it might not be worth it, and that's always been my interpretation of the barefoot philosophy. So the MSN article doesn't make a lot of sense, and sounds like it was written by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. 

Of course, I don't much care what MSN thinks about the study. I want to read it myself. So I followed their link to the actual study. Unfortunately, due to copyright restrictions, I couldn't access the full paper. I could only read the abstract written by the study authors, which is helpful, but prevents me from really digging into their methodology, results, and statistical interpretations. 

Click Read More here or below for a more detailed discussion of the study, but here's the bottom line:

The Bottom Line: The MSN article is terrible and should be ignored. The study itself is sound methodologically, but suffers from some flaws in qualitative value. We don't know how the Vibram runners transitioned, so we don't know whether they did it the right way. We already know that switching from traditional to minimalist/barefoot too fast is stupid and will get you hurt. The p-value of the data is pretty good (p=.009, according to the abstract, which is within the traditional p=.01). This means there's almost a 99% chance these results proceed from an actual physical reality that Vibrams were causing bone bruising. This is a good start, but a lot more research needs to be done. The study's conclusion is sound: if you transition to minimalist/barefoot running, GO SLOW. 

Books On The Run- Born To Run pp. 1-100

Part 1 of a Series

Nuance is not Chris McDougall's style. He writes like a heel striker slamming the pavement in their ultra-padded running shoes. Born To Run is as interesting and exciting as it is maddening and annoying. McDougall shoehorns an inspiring tale of unlikely heroes into a worldview that, at least so far, begs so many questions it's almost as if the author took exactly no time whatsoever thinking through the implications of his thoughts. In the first one hundred pages, I have felt compelled to enjoy the story despite the often disappointing commentary. Let's tackle the two separately.

The Story

Born To Run is an inspiring story of triumph, innovation, and the incredible things humans can do when they set their minds and bodies against impossible tasks. McDougall's writing keeps you right there with the runners. Writing about the actual events of an ultramarathon is a tricky task that he handles well. The action moves seamlessly and you feel the pulse of the race right along with the runners. The Tarahumara are compelling characters in the narrative. They're mysterious and joyful and insouciant in a way that recalls something far older than themselves.

On pg. 74, McDougall tells the tale of "Martimano Cervantes, a forty-two-year-old master of the ball game, and his protege, twenty-five-year-old Juan Herrera. Choguita is bitterly cold at night and sun-scorched by day, so even when running, the Choguita Tarahumara protect themselves with fine woolen ponchos that hang nearly to their feet. As they fly down the trail, capes flowing around them, they look  like magicians appearing from a puff of smoke." This a great description that captures the mystery of the hidden tribe, and you can't help but root for these guys, especially when they run up against the iron-willed Ann Trason, a community college science professor who, at least according to the book, is the champion of the female ultramarathon world. By the end of pg. 100 (and the close of Chapter 15), their showdown is not yet finished, and I can't wait to find out what happens. This is by far the strongest part of Born To Run: this story needed to be told.

Books on the Run

Reviewing Christopher McDougall's Born to Run

Interesting note: In the original, there is 

another man sitting next to the silhouetted man 

on the cover, and the hill is covered with graffiti. 

Both were Photoshopp'd out for the book's cover. 

Today I'm beginning a series of posts about Chris McDougall's 2011 bestseller Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, & the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. McDougall's book set off something of a firestorm in the world of runners, a storm that has only grown with the passage of time. I know a few barefoot runners for whom this book is something of a holy text. I've never read it, but as this blog's purpose is the investigation of the "correct" way to run, this book is a natural place to start. 

The book is not terribly long, but as I'm now about 100 pages into it and I already have enough material for several posts, I'm going to review it in chunks. The first major review post will be up tomorrow. For now, I'm going to introduce the book and make a few notes about its style and my general impressions. 

McDougall is a former war correspondent who writes for magazines like Esquire, Men's Health, and of course, Runner's World. He's a pretty good, if pedestrian, writer. Born to Run is written in a first person, new-journalism style that works well for this story. The book weaves inquiry into injury-free running with the story of the Tarahumara, a native Mexican tribe that lives in seclusion and produces distance athletes whose exploits are the stuff of legend. McDougall actually traveled to the Copper Canyons in Mexico and met this tribe, as well as a cast of others who seem to defy the modern runner's reality of constant injury. 

The book is certainly engaging. You might think this is a boring subject, but you'd be wrong. McDougall's writing flows quickly and keeps the story moving. He weaves in a Quixotic quest to meet Caballo Blanco, a white migrant runner who is known to the Tarahumara, as well as other bits of barefoot and ultradistance running lore. Reading the book is fun and enjoyable, and it doesn't feel like you're slogging through a dense academic treatise (this book is not in the least academic, a complaint I'll return to later). 

Praise for the engaging narrative aside, McDougall's oeuvre as a war correspondent and journalist for masculine magazines is on full display in Born to Run. The style is conversational, which makes for easy reading, but also includes its share of cringe-worthy stylistic moments. On pg. 20, for example: 

Schwatka was no prissy Parisian poet, either; he was a U.S. Army lieutenant who'd survived the Frontier Wars and lived among the Sioux as an amateur anthropologist, so the man knew from mangled corpses. He'd also traveled the baddest of badlands in his time, including a hellacious expedition to the Arctic Circle. But when he got to the Copper Canyons, he had to recalibrate his scoring table.

Or pg. 35:

Not even the two toughest hombres in US military history were any match for the Barrancas [...] The result: Black Jack and Old Blood & Guts could whip the Germans in two world wars, but surrendered to the Copper Canyons. 

This kind of thing gets old after a while, and the book is full of it. My expectations (and taste) are certainly of a literary bent, but even taking that into consideration, I find the ultra-masculine bravado dripping from the words to be a bit much. Mostly a minor quibble, though, especially considering that I don't think I'm the exact audience this book is intended for, and it remains an enjoyable read.

So enough about style. Tomorrow, we dive into Born to Run, and we get the controversy started.

Coming up tomorrow: A Review of Born to Run pp. 1-100!

PureCadence Run #3- Also, Barefootin'

Pemberton on Wednesday (artist's rendition)

It was about 40 degrees on Wednesday, and a strange mix of snow, rain, sleet, hail, and what I can only assume was a new form of frozen precipitation. Slain, maybe. Rail. Sleow.

It was cold, is what I'm saying.

Man's Man Wil Dirkin headed out into the elements for a 7-mile run. I cowered inside with my tender feet and my treadmill. 

I decided to try to run 5 minutes barefoot to begin the workout. My reasoning was that most of this transition from regular shoes to the PureCadences is a matter of muscle memory. I have to re-train my stride so that I land on the midfoot without having to think about it. To that end, I thought some barefoot running on the treadmill would be a good way to retrain my feet. Since you instinctively avoid heel striking when barefoot, I thought that, in theory, I would be running with correct midfoot form without a lot of mental effort. 

I don't know if that was true. What I do know was that the 5:00 was painful. I started out okay, but by the end of the third minute or so I was hurting. The treadmill was set between a 10:00 to 12:00 pace, but I'm pretty sure that was a little slow. It felt closer to an 8:00 mile, even accounting for the fact that I might have perceived the run to be more intense without shoes on. 

My feet after the barefoot running

I got through my five minutes and then put the PureCadences on. That stabilized the pain level, but it didn't make it go away. Interestingly, I felt like my form was much improved with the shoes on. I was experiencing a lot of knee pain by that point in my right knee. Not pleasant, and with my knees, any new pain in there worries me. I finished up 10 minutes with the shoes on, for a total of 15 minutes running. 

I'm not sure exactly what caused all the pain with the barefoot part. It could have been too fast of a pace. It may have been too long of a duration. It might have been the treadmill; I don't know much about barefoot running at this point*, but I don't think they spend a great deal of time on treadmills. 

In any case, a few days off should fix the pain, and then it's back to the Great Stride Adjustment of 2013. With shoes on, this time.

* Which is going to change! I intend to be something of an expert on the subject of running physiology. Plenty of reviews, research, and video to come. 

Lumosity: Day # 3- A Rumination on Memory

Today marks my third day of the full Lumosity experience.

Today's Training Games
Spatial Speed Match (Speed)
Memory Matrix (Memory)
Familiar Faces (Memory)
Eagle Eye (Attention)
Chalkboard Challenge (Problem Solving)

Lumosity gave me a lot of memory work today. Surprisingly, that has so far been my worst of the five attributes the site focuses on (Speed, Memory, Attention, Problem Solving, & Flexibility). My best has been Flexibility, followed closely by Problem Solving.

If you asked me before this started, I would have assumed my ranking of skills would have been (from most-skilled to least-skilled) Memory, Speed, Flexibility, Attention, Problem Solving. That Lumosity suggests that list is exactly backwards is very interesting to me. I've never enjoyed math class very much, and that's always been the subject in school I had to work hardest at. I can generally understand Math as concepts, but the actual cranking out of computations is far more difficult to me. I make silly mistakes, confuse numbers, miss steps- in short, the general panoply of errors that the non-gifted mathematically tend to make.

That Memory is my worst skill so far is very surprising. I have always thought of myself as having a superior memory. I can recall exact lines from books I haven't read in years. I remember exactly what the apartment I lived in with my parents from birth until 4 years old looks like, from the layout of the floor plan to the color of the couch (a horrible brown amalgamation). I remember the color of my grandmother's shirt the time I went on a ride at the fair, got sick to my stomach, and she bought me ginger ale (whitish, with purple stripes). Lumosity really doesn't measure that kind of memory.

I am beginning to wonder if maybe we can distinguish Lumosity's conception of memory from what I think memory is: Lumosity memory is visual recall.Other terms for it might work as well. It's the kind of memory that helps you with math, or that helps you remember where your car keys are, or helps you to remember that trash day is Thursday and you need to take the cans out to the curb. It seems to me a very functional sort of memory, a practical ability.

My own memory perhaps should more properly be called sensation memory. I remember quite clearly the feeling of events. This leads me to remember minute details of those events which led to that feeling. It seems, though, that divorcing the pathos of an experience from its visual details renders it much less meaningful to me. Maybe emotion is the trigger that makes my memory work.  Those cards with the shapes on them don't affect me in any way- they're just visual stimuli. So I remember them less clearly. Perhaps my brain does not flag them as important, or maybe my memory requires a suite of sensations to construct a clear memory. This seems to me a very artistic type of memory. And that makes sense, because it's that kind of memory I tap into when I'm trying to write something. It's not practical, or useful, in the standard sense of helping you live your life. But it helps you to create, because it gives you a pool of sensation to draw from when you need inspiration.

Either way, my struggles with the memory games so far has been enlightening, and somewhat humbling.

PureCadence Run #2: Let's Go To The Videotape!

I ran 1.5 miles outside today in the PureCadences with an average mile pace of 8:27. A little slower than yesterday, but I tried to concentrate more on my form than worry about moving fast. Prior to heading out, I did a little bit of research into proper midfoot strike running form. The general consensus was that midfoot striking requires a shorter stride. Heel-striking runners tend to run at a cadence of 120 bpm (beats per minute, for you non-musicians out there), while midfoot runners run at a typical cadence between 180-240 bpm. Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" comes in at about 118 bpm; some of the faster death metal comes in at about 240 bpm (Morbid Angel's "Dominate," for example, which is a classic of the genre). Just because of that, I already like this midfoot striking thing.

Francis Bacon

Yesterday, I think my stride was a little toe-heavy. I felt like I was digging in with my toes more than letting my foot accept the impact. Today went much better. I slowed down, tried to keep my weight centered over my footfalls, and worked on not "reaching" with my stride. My left Achilles area got sore by the end of the run, but nothing major. After the run, I felt a little tingling in my right outer foot, which happened yesterday as well. It faded both times. I don't feel any difference in the ankle tendinitis pain as of yet. On the bright side, the stress fracture pain hasn't flared up, although even with my traditional-style Brooks Adrenalines on, the pain doesn't start until into the 2nd mile of a run.

Now all that sounds good, but how much do you really know how your foot is landing when you run? How much is wishful thinking? Opinion, in my opinion, is just a synonym for bullshit. One of this blog's heroes is Francis Bacon, 16th century English philosopher and a pioneer of inductive reasoning and the scientific method. Let's be more Francis Bacon-like about this.

LET'S GO TO THE VIDEOTAPE!

I used my mom's treadmill and my iPhone to take some footage of my stride and foot strike, both barefoot and with the PureCadences on. I then used Windows Movie Maker and some "acquired" Youtube music clips to compile the footage, add some sound and some slow-mo, and below you see the results. First, the barefoot:

Pretty straightforward. I see a fairly clear midfoot strike, without a lot of heel.

Now for the PureCadence:

This is a little less clear. Some strides look dead on to the barefoot strike. There's also some definite reaching in there, and some times when the heel is getting down a little too early. Were I grading this midfoot strike, I'd give it a solid C+. Clearly there is more work to do.

For some comparison, here's some high quality video with better slow motion (but much worse music) of midfoot striking:

I think my stride looked like that at times. Other times the form was less pronounced. My strike seems a little sloppy sometimes. Still, that's encouraging. I'm not far off. I can do the correct motion, I just need to improve my consistency, something that should come

Lumosity: Day 2

Eventually these posts will be less frequent, as there will be less to report. At first, I'm going to try to keep up with the daily games and record those. Eventually I'll move on to documenting how much better I'm getting at the Lumosity games, and whether that seems to be having any effect on my brain powers in other areas.

Today's Training Games:
Word Bubbles Rising (Flexibility)
Color Match (Flexibility)
Lost in Migration (Attention)
Speed Match (Speed)
Spatial Speed Match (Speed)

That was my 5-game regimen for today. Apparently Lumosity thinks I need work on my mental flexibility and speed.

Color Match was really difficult. On one side was a color word; for instance, "Yellow." "Yellow" might be written in any color. On the right was another color word, again written in a color that may or may not correspond to the word written on the card. The task was to decide if the word on the left matched the color of the lettering on the right. Not an easy thing to do.

Word Bubbles was a repeat from yesterday, where I was given a prefix and had to make words from that. It claims to increase verbal fluency, which I'm skeptical about. Just as yesterday, I came up with tons of words, and some of them were really long and complex and precise. Also as was the case yesterday, I missed the opportunity for simple words, this time "over" and "much" specifically. I also entered the word multifluous and was informed by Lumosity that that is not a word. A quick Google search reveals that the word is often hyphenated (multi-fluous) or with its original Latin spelling (multifluus).

Either way, you are wrong, Lumosity! It means copiously flowing, and I want my 50 points.

First Run in PureCadence 2s

I ran 1.41 miles today, at an 8:05 pace. The PureCadences are designed to encourage a more midfoot to forefoot strike when running. They're very flexible, minimally padded, and extremely light. When I first put them on, I tried to stand up and almost fell over. They "encourage" a midfoot strike by taking away your heel. Not only is there a zero drop from toe to heel, but the back edge of the heel is...well, missing, basically. The sole ends and curves upward into the back of the foot and the Achilles region before normal shoes do.

PureCadence 2:
Keith Wright El Presidente color scheme

The effect of the missing heel is that, when you run outside in these and you heel strike, it hurts like a sonofabitch. You feel a nasty jolt pretty much up to your knee. It's not pleasant, and it certainly works to remind you to land forward. 

Now, landing on your midfoot is weird, and it's awkward, and it takes a ton of concentration if you're used to heel striking with abandon. I have some experience with this kind of running, ironically from playing baseball. In high school I played a lot of outfield, and I pitched. Outfielders are taught to run on the balls of your feet so that your eyes don't bounce around too much when you're tracking a fly ball. The idea is that you can more easily run the ball down if your eyes stay stable and locked on it as it flies. Pitchers are taught to land on the balls of their glove-side feet (left foot for me, as a righty) as they come down off the mound. The concept mirrors the philosophy behind the PureCadences: the balls of your feet have muscles that can decelerate your body more efficiently and safely. If you land on your heel with every pitch you throw, it puts a ton of stress on your knees and back. 

Action shot of me running

So I had some experience with running on the balls of my feet. That being said, running on the balls of your feet, with a midfoot strike, is a graceful, athletic, controlled movement. I am neither graceful nor controlled nor athletic. I run like a caveman: my feet slam, HARD, and I run very, very heavy. I'm something of an angry and aggressive runner. All you people who say you think clearly and tranquilly when you run? Yeah, I know nothing about that. I run because the world pisses me off, and I'm trying to kick it in its stupid face with the bottoms of my feet. 

And therein probably lies the root of my injury problems. Currently I have a proto-stress fracture in my right foot, severe tendinitis in both ankles and feet, pain behind my knees, and bad shin splints. I've seen an orthopedic surgeon about the stress fracture, had x-rays and MRIs, and was advised to rest it for two months. I did, and immediately on returning to running, the same problems returned.  I've had my left ACL reconstructed, my left meniscus reconstructed and eventually removed, and in general I have no cartilage to speak of in my knees. I also have some bone necrosis in my right foot, the result of using that foot to block a slap shot in ice hockey. I'm trying the PureCadences as a way to run more gently and sustainably.

As I began the run, I felt like my feet were clenched, fist-like, because I was afraid of the impact. I had to consciously try to relax my feet so that my toes would accept the impact, rather than brace for it and clench tightly, which felt very unpleasant and I'm sure would lead to injury after a while. 

Toe groove

As I got to about the half-mile mark, I started to feel a little better about the stride. Every 6th or 7th strike still felt a little too far in the heel, and I had trouble going downhill without completing slamming my heel. The PureCadences have a toe groove that's designed to keep your big toe off to the side of the foot (think of spreading your fingers and you'll get the idea of what it's doing). I didn't feel that at all as I run. My feet just aren't in that position as I'm running. So I'm not getting any benefit from the toe groove. 

I did feel like this was a promising start, however. I sprinted the last 50 feet or so of the run, and I felt fast. FAST. I felt very light on my feet and very strong in my push off. Whether that will translate into fixing my injury problems remains to be seen. 

Lumosity: Day #1

On Sunday, March 3, 2013, I embarked on the dual quests described in the Greetings post. I decided to keep the Lumosity and running writeups sequestered into different posts, so that if by some chance anyone ever reads this blog, they can skip the half they don't care about. If there are hordes of people out there transitioning to minimalist running shoes who are also gravely concerned with their cognitive health, well, then I apologize for making you look for both sets of posts.

So, Lumosity! The gist of Lumosity is this: scientists used to think cognitive ability was fixed in childhood. Now, they believe in something called neuroplasticity, which is a fancy way of expressing the idea that your brain can grow, change, and improve in response to repeated stimuli. Lumosity attempts to capitalize on that by having you play games that help your brain to "exercise," thereby building new neurons and creating more neural pathways and connections. They claim to be able to improve your memory, attention, and problem solving skills, among many others. There is a ton of brain scan and other science behind this, which I looked into, and it doesn't seem completely farfetched to me. The underlying belief is that the games target simple cognitive tasks that are the building blocks of more complex mental processes. So if you want to be able to concentrate better amidst distraction, Lumosity has you play a game where it shows you a group of five birds. They can be pointing any of the four directions (up, down, left, or right). But the game asks you to press the keyboard arrow that corresponds to the direction of the central bird ONLY. The birds are configured in any number of patterns, so you need to determine which is the central bird, and what direction it's facing. And you have to do this quickly. There's a timer running. You come back to the site everyday and spend about 15 minutes playing a few of these games. You do this day after day, and the site claims your cognitive abilities will improve.

I'd been messing around with the free trial for a while, and decided today to pony up the cash and sign up for a year's subscription to the entire site. Paying for it gets you access to more brain exercises, more personally customized training plans, and detailed comparisons of your performance to people in your age group. Interestingly, my "stats" so far tell me that I'm well below the Lumosity average for every skill, with the exception of Problem Solving, which for them means solving simple math problems quickly and accurately. I'm in the 93rd percentile for Problem Solving. That's surprising to me, because I think I'm pretty bad at math.

One of the games was a word game. There was (of course, as always) a timer running. The game gives you a 3-letter prefix, and you have to make as many words as possible that start with that 3-letter combination. I thought I did extremely well. The site did not agree. Now, my words were good words. SAT words, my mother would say. One of my prefixes was "con;" I had words like conflation, congruence, confluence, continental- like I said, good words. I had many words. When I was done, the game suggested I might have entered "cone" as one of my words. I feel I was robbed.

So today, the games were the word game I just described, "Bubble Words," the math game from above called "Rain Drops," and "Bird Watching," which is to train your concentration and peripheral vision.

Greetings

PureCadence 2. The real thing's white
borders are a lot more gray than this. 

So I have this idea. I'd been kicking around two ideas lately, and they both went from idea to reality today. I had been trying Lumosity, the brain-training website, for a little while now via a free trial. I had also ordered myself a pair of Brooks PureCadence minimalist running shoes last week. Today, those shoes and I went for a run, and I took the plunge and signed up for the full Lumosity site. I'm trying to train my feet to land in a totally different way when I run, and I'm trying to train my brain to be faster and more flexible.

And I thought I would blog about it. I figure this way, I can keep a record of my progress with both of these quests. It's not like I need an excuse to write something anyway. So here we are.

This is present-day Carthage.
The Romans did in fact destroy it.
Several times.  Legend says they salted
the earth the final time so that
nothing would ever grow there again. 

In case anyone is wondering, the title of the blog is a Latin phrase that means Carthage must be destroyed.  Carthage was Rome's mortal enemy, a rival city in Northern Africa that thwarted their military conquest repeatedly. The great general Hannibal was famous for leading his armies through the alps, which was thought to be impossible, to attack the actual city of Rome. Carthage was Rome's only real existential threat during the Late Republic. A Roman statesman named Cato the Elder used to conclude every speech to the Senate with this phrase, no matter what it was about. So he might give a long speech about crop yields, building plans, the weather, and at the end he would say, "...and also I think Carthage must be destroyed." It was a sign of his single-minded stubbornness, and his refusal to give up on his belief that Carthage must be, well, destroyed. It seemed pertinent to both of these quests I'm on, since they're both going to require a lot of stubborn perseverance.  I'm teaching myself Latin, so some Latin might occasionally find its way here too. And let's face it, it sounds pretty badass, doesn't it?

Next post will be Day 1 of Lumosity and my first run with the PureCadence shoes on.