I am reaching the point with running that reading any more or researching any more about it is doing me no good. These last couple weeks I have tried to rely more on learning from direct physical experience and thinking less.
Here's an example from tonight. About 15 minutes into my run, my left foot started to hurt. So at that point I had a choice: walk home, or run differently such that it would not hurt. I chose the latter, and ran the rest of the loop home without any pain.
Now I think that I was overstriding, and I made changes to my stride to shorten it a bit. But who really knows. The bottom line was that this change improved my stride in the short-term.
I was thinking too about back when I ran a lot over a two-year period from 1995 – 1997. Back then there were no form gurus and no real internet presence. I'm sure my stride back then was not perfect as I ran with the thicker shoes that were available at the time. But here's the interesting part: I never got injured over that two-year period. Sure, I got tired when I pushed it too hard, but I never had any injury that stopped me from running. And this was from putting zero intellectual thought into the way I was running, and just training by feel.
Of course I was younger back then as well. But it makes you wonder…
It’s not unlike diet and nutrition.Most of the battle is bad stuff we have picked up along the way. Eliminating the bad juju and behaviours is 90% of the battle. All of the stuff people talk about with running works but it is typically a response to bad body and mind responses. If our base line is to get out of the way we will be well served.Obviously the devil will eventually be in the details but it’s a good home base. The key is the nervous system and it’s output.When an answer seems elusive, there is a good chanse that the wrong question has been asked.
I had a really awesome swim coach in high school. At one point he thought I was doing something wrong with my stroke but couldn’t come up with a drill off the top of his head to fix it. So he had everyone do a 1000m pull. I don’t know if a really long run is analogous, mostly because swimming is low impact by definition, but there’s something there to letting your body just figure it out.