Natural Running Symposium – Q & A – Part 5

John: Question?

Audience: I’m wondering about the…I ran for a lot of years, and I’ve been biking for the last four years and loving it, but I wanted to get back into running. I wear orthotics, and I’m a little bit nervous about not running with orthotics.

I remember I ran the Beach to Beacon about 5 times, and the most fun I had is I juggled the entire race. All the way through the race. And it was easy, and the recovery was amazingly fast because I was forward.

Danny: Yeah!

Audience: Everybody said, “Boy! You must be tired.” I said, “No, I’ve been training for this.” I had to train away from the roads because people kept looking back at me…

(Audience Laughs)

So I trained on a track, but I was ready to run like the next day.

Danny: Yeah! That’s the way it is.

Jamie: It’s funny sometimes. You can take somebody who is superbly fit, and I do a lot of muscle testing evaluation in my office and they’re strong everywhere, and then you get down to the feet and I ask them to hold their foot like that and I push it that way, and for the life of them they can’t hold it. So they’re strong all the way down to their ankles.

And it’s because…the analogy that I use is if you put your arm in a sling every morning when you woke up, and you took it off when you went to bed, and you do that for 6 months, what’s it going to look like when you’re done?

I mean, orthotics, and she could tell us, they don’t actually support your feet as much as you think. They don’t lessen the impact. If anything, they allow you to run in such a way that it heightens the impact. And at the same time it’s making your feet become weaker with time.

So it is hard. You just have to go real slow. When I first got Newtons, I literally ran for like 5 minutes, and then I would come home and put some other shoes on to finish the run, and just really slowly upped…I did just start over. I started with like 1 mile.

John: Erik?

Audience: To followup, with your desire to be more proprioceptive with barefoot, I guess the natural question to ask then is, would you do it on a surface such as sand, or grass or pavement, and that’s a question I asked of Chris McDougal, so I’m curious what your answer would be.

Kirsten: I think it’s interesting. I think that I would almost go on a hard surface. That would be sort of my…just to start with. I don’t know. Just to sort of get that proprioceptive, or on the grass. I know that Jamie’s done it on the grass the whole entire time to get that proprioceptive ability.

I don’t have a good answer on which one I would start with. I think that you can at least see a little bit when you’re starting when you’re going on a hard surface and you’re going to be a little bit more know what the surface is and you know where you are, and if you’re on a track or something flat, you can sort of work with that if you’re starting out type of thing.

But then ultimately, I think you get to a point where if you gained some more strength in the intrinsics of the foot, you can run down to the boulevard and back. It doesn’t really matter so much what the surface is.

Jamie: I think grass is a good place to start. One of the biggest surprises that I had was the road actually, after a while the road became very comfortable because you know what’s on the road generally. You can see. I never got to know trees so well as when I was running barefoot. “Oh, there’s an oak tree. Look out for acorns.”

On the road you can pretty much see. So it comes to be more about the texture of the road, is it freshly or newly paved, is it smooth? That actually feels really nice.

John: Mike?

Audience: I have a question for Danny as far as Newtons on trail. Because of that firm platform, is that going to make trail running unusual.

Danny: No, it’s awesome actually. Because the way the lugs move independently, if you step on a rock in the middle of all that wearing a foam shoe, even if there’s a plate in there, if it has a plate in there, you just kind of roll off the side of it, or it’s going to come up and spear your foot, bruise your foot.

But the Newtons, you have the plate on the top for protection, bio-mechanical. But underneath, the lugs will just bend and morph around whatever you’re stepping on. So the Newtons are awesome off road. I’ve run in our Racers, 50 miles on trail with no problem. It allows you to be more agile and feel what you’re feeling.

Typical Trail Shoes get too overly protective and too stiff, and it’s easier actually to sprain your ankle and things of that nature and stuff. Trying to get the heel out of the way.