Tread lightly around running info in the New York Times

I should probably establish a tag just for posts complaining about the sludge that the New York Times, the U.S.A.'s largest daily newspaper, foists on the running public with dismaying regularity.

The substandard stuff these writers expel can be divided loosely into a few categories. They're generally -- but not always -- sanguine enough to avoid peddling flat-out misinformation, so they instead settle for repurposing familiar ideas as cutting-edge discoveries ("OLDER THAN YODA? YOU MAY HAVE TO SLOW DOWN!"), creating faux-dramatic pieces based on hyperextended or poorly applied research findings ("RUNNING TOO MUCH MIGHT JUST KILL YOU!") and writing articles that are simply worthless in that they either state the obvious or acknowledge that what's needed to address a given problem is literally impossible.

This piece is an example of the last type. The headline alone, "Why We Get Running Injuries (and How to Prevent Them)" is a double dose of buncombe in that the article not only offers nothing new or helpful about the nature of running injuries, but also fails to give any feasible ways to keep them from occurring. If this were a column about football, an equivalent headline might be "Why It's Useful For Linemen To Strong (And How To Get That Way Without Exercising)."

I'll mostly ignore the fact that the author, although mentioning in an "Oh-and-by-the-way" manner that the study under discussion included only women subjects, fails to account for the importance of this, and get to the heart of why this article is dumb.

This passage alone renders everything else in the piece almost not worth reading:

The never-injured runners, as a group, landed far more lightly than those who had been seriously hurt, the scientists found, even when the researchers controlled for running mileage, body weight and other variables.

That finding refutes the widely held belief that a runner cannot land lightly on her heels.

...The data also, however, contain a more general message for those of us who are not as wispy and whippy in our landings. Consciously think about “a soft landing,” Dr. Davis said.

First of all, if you need anyone to tell you that hitting the ground less forcefully is advisable when you're trying to avoid running injuries, then you may have a closet stuffed full of titles of ownership of the Brooklyn Bridge, penis-growth pills, books on how to live to be 157 years old by adopting vegan Buddhism, and roll upon roll of aluminum foil. You may be floored by the idea that anorexic sumo wrestlers are at a competitive disadvantage, and that battle tanks are no good in drag-racing.

Second, "that finding" is not new -- more on this below -- and "the widely held belief" is in the same epistemological category as "Lactic acid makes you slow down" or even "Women can't handle long distances like men can." This nonsense makes me want to go for a swim just to calm my mind down, but I ate a candy bar less than an hour ago and I don't want to catch a cramp and drown.

And third, the most easily derided aspect of the article is that consciously thinking about a soft landing is apt to do as much for your running form as consciously thinking about your vertical leap with do for your dunking ability. This suggestion is perhaps even worse than the sarcastic retort my mind jabbered when I read it: Why not put an Alter-G on a motorized chassis and coast around town that way?

Long before the December 2015 BJSM article was published -- and this study, if the abstract is any indication, is also fairly useless in that its conclusion is "Runners who don't get injured have the characteristics of uninjured runners" -- there was a veritable buttload of research out there (inasmuch as buttloads can be treated as literal amounts) supporting both the fact that most of us land farther back on our heels than we think we do and the reassurance that this doesn't lead to more stress-related injuries per se. This UK Guardian article from 2014 is one of many pieces that deftly and accurately address the issue, and in a non-lazy, utilitarian way. Good stuff:

“Heel striking has received more negative press than it deserves,” believes Jessica Leitch, director of the Run3D Clinic in Oxford. “The evidence simply doesn’t support the theory that everyone should run with a midfoot or forefoot strike to avoid injury. Yes, it alters loading mechanics, with joints and tissues stressed differently by different footstrike types, but in doing so, it often shifts the problem from one area to another.”

Mitchell Phillips, director of gait specialists at StrideUK, agrees that a change, rather than a reduction, in injuries is the likely outcome of switching footstrike. “A migration from heel to forefoot running may reduce the number of knee-related injuries but increase the potential for calf-related injuries,” he says.

That said, a retrospective study at Harvard University in 2012 found that, over the course of a competitive season, forefoot strikers on the college running team experienced fewer injuries than heel strikers. Critics argued that the runners involved in the study were “self-selected” forefoot strikers: in other words, it was their natural stride and they hadn’t been forced or coached into changing it. And, as Leitch points out, footstrike is often studied because it’s an easy variable to measure – it doesn’t necessarily link cause with effect.

So there you go. If you monkey substantially with your form, you're probably going to find yourself playing a game of injury Whack-a-Mole, unless your form is badly off because you've already been consciously manipulating it to your disadvantage. As I saw in my days coaching high-school runners, a very common mistake is over-striding; new runners love trying to mimic what seems like it has to be the most fluid and graceful way to cover ground, reminiscent of a pronghorn antelope-David Rudisha hybrid.

Being true to your more natural shuffle is a way to both keep injuries at bay and improve your race times (and for an outstanding treatment of the energetics of rearfoot-striking, try this Alex Hutchison piece). If you have other running-related goals in mind, well, I'm not sure what more I can say here.