Tag: running

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Jockology: running surfaces and injuries

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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This week’s Jockology column tackles the longstanding question of how different running surfaces affect your risk of injury. The science here is a lot less clear than you might expect.

The question

Will running on hard surfaces like asphalt and concrete increase my risk of injury?

The answer

In a study to be published later this year, Brazilian researchers found that your feet feel about 12 per cent more pressure with each foot strike when running on asphalt compared to grass.
Thanks for that newsflash, Captain Obvious, you might say.
But the findings actually contradict several earlier studies, which – despite what our intuition tells us – have found that we seem to automatically adapt our running stride so that hard and soft surfaces administer roughly the same shock to the body.
In fact, it may be the smoothness of paved surfaces that makes them dangerous to runners, rather than their hardness. And softer, less even surfaces carry their own injury risks, so the best answer may lie somewhere in the middle. [read more…]

(And a random shout-out to Dan Peterson at the Sports Are 80 Percent Mental blog — I think he was the one who introduced me to the prodigious research output of Captain Obvious, though I can’t seem to find the post I’m thinking of anymore!)

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Pump your arms to speed up your legs, thanks to “neural coupling”

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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“Keep pumping your arms!” That’s one of those canonical pieces of advice that it seems every coach gives to his or her runners. The idea is that, late in a run or race when your legs are burning and you’re starting to slow down, if you keep moving arms briskly, your legs will follow. It’s a nice idea — it’s always good to have some concrete piece of advice that you can hang onto when it seems like the world is about to explode. But does it work?

Unfortunately, I don’t know. But in the course of researching a completely different topic today, I stumbled on an interesting piece of research by Daniel Ferris, a University of Michigan researcher who’s best known for his research into assisted movement using robotic exoskeletons. The paper, which appeared in the journal Exercise and Sport Science Reviews back in 2006, is called “Moving the arms to activate the legs.” The full text is available here.

Ferris’s main focus in the paper is on rehabilitation for patients with spinal cord injuries, helping them learn to walk again. The gist is as follows:

Humans have neural connections between their upper limbs and lower limbs that coordinate muscle activation patterns during locomotor tasks… Recent studies indicate that arm swing may also facilitate lower limb muscle activation via neural coupling. Clinical observations of individuals with spinal cord injury first suggested that rhythmic upper limb movement improved lower limb muscle recruitment during stepping. More recently, studies on neurologically intact subjects have demonstrated an increase in lower limb muscle activation that is proportional to upper limb muscle recruitment during seated recumbent stepping.

The “seated recumbent stepping” he mentions above is a neat set-up. Basically, you sit back in a contraption that you can power with either your arms, your legs, or both. With some careful experiments, Ferris and his colleagues were able to show that when the subjects moved their arms back and forth (opposite to leg motion, as in walking and running), they were able to achieve greater muscle recruitment in their legs. Now, you might assume this is just because it’s easier to get good leverage with your leg if your opposite arm is also moving, but they tried various set-ups with the torso partly or fully strapped to the seat (so you couldn’t twist the torso to get a better angle), and the same results were observed.

The link from this to “Pump your arms when you approach the finish, and your legs will move faster” is still pretty weak. But this idea of “neural coupling” is interesting — so I guess I’ll pump my arms with renewed vigour next time I’m starting to tie up.

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World Champs marathon

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Just finished watching the marathon from the IAAF World Championships in Berlin. Watched the leaders running live through Internet streaming, and followed the Canadians in real time as they posted 5K splits on the IAAF website. It’s a race I was particularly interested in because of an article I wrote last year about Canada’s marathon standards (which earned a National Magazine Award). In 2008, Canada sent no marathoners to the Olympics; this year, in contrast, they sent four men and one woman. So how would this team fare, with its easier standards?

It was a mixed bag, but there were some very encouraging results. Take Reid Coolsaet — some excerpts from his blog:

I’ve been geeking out looking over results and time splits from the past few World Championships to see different pacing strategies.  Seems like a lot of guys go out too hard and fall off pace, often not finishing and saving it for another day.  For a top 10 finish you almost always have to go out with the lead group but there are numerous examples of top 20 and 30 finishes with more sensible pacing strategies. […]

Don’t expect to see me in much TV coverage as the cameras will be concentrating on the leaders.  I’m ranked about 95th out of 100.  Expect me to improve on that ranking.

Unfortunately, the results on the IAAF website are messed up right now, so I can’t give as full a breakdown as I’d like. But here are a few details on Reid’s performance:

[split] / [place]

5K / 75

10K /64

15K / 69

20K / 54

25K / 40

30K / 36

35K / 28

42.2K / 26

Fantastic (and very smart) race for a guy who was ranked 95th. Congratulations, Reid! (And also to Dylan Wykes, who executed the exact same game plan until the last few kilometres, where he lost just a few places but still finished in the top half of the field.)

That’s all for me for a week. Tomorrow morning, I fly to Alice Springs for some hiking in the Australian outback. Should be lots of fun, and I’ll be back on August 30.

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Barefoot running: theory versus practice

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

***

With the publication of Chris McDougall’s Born to Run this spring, there’s been a flurry of interest in barefoot running (or minimalist running, which involves donning ultralight shoes like the Vibram FiveFingers, whose function is to keep your soles clear of broken glass and doggie doo rather than support your ankles). I had an interesting chat with McDougall for an feature I wrote in the July-August issue of Canadian Running (an excerpt is available here, but the full article isn’t available online at this point). I mention this because a reader just forwarded me a good overview of the topic from Wired, which offers its usual research-backed take on the topic [thanks for the tip, Adam].

To me, the jury is still out on this one. I like the theory behind minimalist running, and am willing to believe that, for those who take the time to build up slowly and do it right, it may be a route to injury-free running. But in practice, I’m not convinced that it’s widely applicable in our concrete-covered world, especially for people who have grown up wearing shoes. The extreme patience and diligence needed for a successful transition to barefoot running are precisely the qualities that most of us fail to demonstrate when running in regular shoes — which is why we get injured in the first place. So I think minimalism will remain a minority option for a small group of very methodical people who have tried and failed to run injury-free in regular shoes, but are truly committed to finding a way to run.

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Running marathons makes your memory worse…and better

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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This is a neat paper on how running affects the mind, with a surprise twist. (Check out Frontal Cortex and Neurocritic for more detailed discussions.) Researchers at Columbia University wondered whether the extreme stress of running a marathon might trigger hormones in the brain that would temporarily alter how our minds work. It’s a reasonable assumption:

Indeed, [the researchers write] cortisol levels recorded 30 min after completion of a marathon rival those reported in military training and interrogation (Taylor et al., 2007), rape victims being treated acutely (Resnick, Yehuda, Pitman, & Foy, 1995), severe burn injury patients (Norbury, Herndon, Branski, Chinkes, & Jeschke, 2008), and first-time parachute jumpers (Aloe et al., 1994).

So does running disrupt your memory? Yes. The researchers tested Boston and New York marathon participants, either a few days before their race or within 30 minutes of finishing, and the post-race tests showed worse performance on a set of verbal memory tests. That’s an example of “explicit memory,” where you consciously remember events and facts. But here’s the surprise: the researchers also found that the post-race testees did better on tests of “implicit memory,” which is how you store information that you don’t need to access consciously, like how to ride a bike.

In other words, it appears that being under stress (and marathons definitely count as stress!) causes you to tap into the older, reptilian part of your brain, where instinct and intuition dominate.

[Thanks to Kyle for the tip. I’m heading out the door in a few hours for a week-long canoe trip, so expect the next blog update around August 10. Happy long weekend!]