OK, brace yourselves for a post about feet again (or just run away, I understand).

I posted a month ago, and the capsulitis injury was behaving pretty well, and it still is. I’ve learned some modifications to my walking stride from the fine people at the Google group on minimalist running (http://groups.google.com/group/huaraches), and have been slowly building up mileage, safely.
Well, enter volleyball, my favorite sport. (I even told Craig that I’d rather practice vball than go to a movie or out to dinnner, that’s how much I love it.) Several days of running around like a lunatic after shots gone far afield, and I’m having some arch problems that will almost definitely take me out of the hiking plans I had for the weekend. I had trouble completing a 2.7 mile walk, because of the pain…but it wasn’t capsulitis. It’s also transient, and will go away fairly soon, as long as I give it a rest for a bit.

All of this is done with Vibram Five Fingers on, or no shoes at all…I pretty much wear shoes about 30% of the time. And I’m not experiencing the decline that the podiatrist insisted was right around the corner. What I’m changing is my way of moving, and that’s changing my feet. Sometimes, I rush it & try to take on too much, and I get slapped back down for a bit, but this is all moving towards a much better outcome than I hoped for, 12 months ago.

Chris MacDougall (the author of Born to Run, the book that got me started hoping I could fix myself) put up a pretty long post on his blog yesterday, and a lot of it touches on the slowly-growing controversy around what are called “motion-control shoes”. Here’s the link, but I’ll paraphrase a bit, because it’s interesting:
One of the innovators of motion-control shoe technology says now that anti-pronation shoes (that are supposed to keep you from rolling your feet) often cause a mild tendency to pronate to turn into a much more severe tendency (the blurb cites going from 8 degrees of tilt to 20. In other words, the shoes make it worse.)
What’s more, Runner’s World has started to change its stance on motion-control running shoes, which used to be its thing, in a big way. They had to somewhat, since the study from Harvard came out. They’ve also acknowledged that people who run by hitting the ground with their heels first (called a “heel strike”) have a lot of work to do to relearn how to move. (I’m one of them. It sucks. But it’s worth it to me to get past it.)

All of this might sound like a big load of boring, but look: real people got real results, without Senate hearings, without lawsuits, just by doing the science, running the stats, providing tons of evidence, and by ordinary people running better than ever & telling their friends about it. And big companies are now listening. To everyone involved, I have to say, “Nicely done.”

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