Running Blues

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on increasing my running speed and I’ve turned recently to a style of running called forefoot striking. Naturally, it seems, I land very heavily on my heel, so running more on the balls of my feet is supposed to not only help me run faster, but also help save some of the stress that running can cause on the rest of the body (at least some researchers believe that the balls of our feet are better designed for weight bearing landings than our heels).

As a side note: I tried running barefoot on the cement last week as an experiment to see what my feet would do without high tech running shoes. Since humans have spent most of our history running barefoot, I thought it would be telling to see what my feet did in a more “natural” state. Interestingly enough, barefoot, I run on the balls of my feet.

Trying to change from striking my heel when I run hasn’t been easy in part because my running shoes have thick, sturdy heels that practically beg to hit the ground. But as I was out struggling this morning to make my stride longer and land more fully on my forefeet, I was struck by an irony of this attempted transition. I was born with severely clubbed feet, which means that my feet turned inwards and wouldn’t flex at all. When my father used to tell me about my birth, he would always describe the moment when he first saw me, and how one of his first thoughts was to wonder “why your feet were so pointed.”

After an unsuccessful series of casts and metal braces, when I was four months old, orthopedic surgeons clipped my Achilles tendons to lengthen them, allowing me finally to flex my feet. Apparently, they did an excellent job, because here I am decades later, trying to transition back to running more in line with my original foot position, on the balls of my feet.

So as I was running today, concentrating ridiculously hard on the position of my feet, I thought about how different my life would have been if I hadn’t received first-rate medical care as a baby, or had been born before the surgery technique I received was practiced. And also, how strange it is to try to transition to a more “natural” stride that disregards all the modern technology and convention associated with running and running shoes.

Left in my “natural” state, I probably wouldn’t have been able to walk at all, or would have walked with a significant limp and pain. Medical technology allowed me to have a more “normal” gait, walking without much difficulty. And here I am eschewing modern technology in an attempt to return to that “natural” running state. I’m not sure exactly what my point is here, other than the inherent complexity of ideas like “natural” and “normal,” of allowing technology to help us when it can, and eschewing it when we so choose, of appreciating our contemporary lives as the strangely ironic things that they so often seem to be. But I’m going to continue to think about it—and continue trying to reconnect with my long lost pointed running feet.

 

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief for POTB

 

You can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com