Thinking Backwards
Confucius Says; The Future Belongs to the Efficient
What makes my perspective of athletics different is that I make the mistake of
thinking backwards. After years of running, listening to coaches, and reading
vast amounts of any literature I could get my hands on, I always came away
feeling that something was wrong with what I was told or read. My search to
improve my running skills always hit a brick wall that myself and many others
want to climb over.
In constant want of becoming a better and faster runner, current training mythology
left me with plenty of speed drills to follow, stretching regimens, or strength
training techniques to implement, but simply didn't satisfy my passion to improve.
And if all traditional thoughts of training techniques couldn't satisfy my wants,
then what was I missing?
Improving one's speed is currently dominated by a philosophy of coaching based upon
the idea that being an elite performer requires natural talent and such talents
can be developed, but not taught. You've either got talent or you don't goes traditional
ideology. So my question is a little unique; how did the talented learn their talent?
In the world of running literature, proper running form is easy to learn if you
follow the writers "secrets." Proper running form is something that all coaching
and running books want to teach you because if you want to get better, then you know
you've got something new to learn.
But what if you've followed the advice you've read or heard and still haven't
set a new personal best in your favorite race time? Then what are you supposed
to do? Your only other option is to push yourself to increase your speed, in
hope your body mechanics will naturally find the efficiency means necessary to
adapt and in end result improve your speed.
And if your body can't adapt to your speed push, you've just written the
perfect recipe for injuring yourself. It's one reason speed drills alone can
be highly counterproductive. Added speed to inefficient biomechanics is like
increasing the speed of an out of balance engine. Your leg turnover is similar
to the RPM's of an engine. If leg turnover is out of balance, eventually It'll
tear itself apart no different than a car motor.
At the levels of research writing, the conclusion is that a runner will find a stride
that's most efficient for them naturally whether we like that fact or not. We go
back and forth from coaches to training tools like parachutes or plyometric techniques
trying to push ourselves to go faster. But regardless of what we read, improving
ourselves in reality is incredibly difficult to do.
We pacify ourselves in thinking that the great runners will simply remain great
and our place will be to forever contemplate the designs on the bottom of their
running shoes. But even the best in any subject have teachers. And in that truth,
I decided to find out who taught the best runners and ask if I could learn from
them as well.
With our running media hyping how Kenyan runners have dominated distance races for
the past decade, didn't the question of how that happened cross your mind? How in
the history of running did this whole new era in running dominance emerge? My question
was in wanting to be a better runner, how could I find their teacher and learn the
same skills these running icons possess.
For the last decade, runners from Kenya have been dominating marathon running
and the theories abound as to why they're the sport's top athletes. My
question was a little more focused. If experts claim to know the secret, then
why haven't they created a runner capable of beating them considering that
they've had over 10 years to try and do it?
With an incredible arsenal of technology available to the "experts" of running, it
was obvious to me that they were looking in the wrong direction to create a runner
capable of beating any of the top Kenyan athletes. So in what direction would someone
else go to explain Kenyan running dominance?
Biomechanical Experts
That answer came in March of 2002, as Otto Pohl published in the New York Times newspaper
the link to an answer. The story documented that for over three decades the biomechanic
"experts" of running have kept a very unique secret from the running world. And that story
is about the tribal women of Kenya who carry firewood for their survival.
Why the need for you to know their story? Because these women are able to carry 20% of their
bodyweight in firewood above their heads and walk for up to eight hours a day. The astonishing
fact is that they do it with no change in heart rate compared to walking without any added
weight.
Since doing more work requires more energy, the women of Kenya are a complete mystery to
biomechanic experts, which is why they've been left out of running literature for the past
few decades. And no expert is really a running expert if they can't answer anyone's questions
about how these women walk. So the solution to admitting the unexplained was easy for the
experts; don't bring up the subject.
For well over 30 years, unlocking the secret of Kenyan tribal women has been the true
"Holy Grail" of biomechanics since their efficiency skills were discovered. The unique
aspect for myself is how secret their studies of these women has been and how ignored their
story, even since Pohl's article was published.
And for you it means a path to follow in understanding why Kenyans dominate distance running
and how you can beat them. With the acknowledged unique skill of these tribal women, they're
the unmentioned key to your running future. These women are teachers to the best distance
runners in the world, and until today, have received no credit for their accomplishment.
Carrying the weight of firewood with no increase in energy consumption is impossible to do,
so the women of Kenya accomplished what many of today's running "experts" deem impossible
to do: thousands of years ago these women created their own solution for an energy consumption
question; they physically alter their walking gait to carry the wood more efficiently.
With the "expert" opinion that creating a more efficient way to run is impossible to do,
the fewer who know of these women, the less chance their secret will be explained. No expert
wants to be proven wrong even though the potential model for a better running technique has
been out there for thousands of years. What you don't know can't hurt the experts, or help you.
That's the joke for me, so who taught you to run? No baby gets taught to crawl, nobody gets
taught to stand, nobody gets taught to walk and eventually run. In fact by the time you did
figure out you could run your vocabulary was about five words total if you were lucky. Not
exactly the communication skills to carry on a PhD level discussion of running biomechanics
now is it?
Researchers will tell you that you develop your own running style naturally, but I think
that you walk and run the way you do because you watched your parents and subconsciously
learned from them how to take your very first step. I fully believe that they didn't give
you any natural genetic advantage over anyone else. Your parents were simply a subconscious
role model that you unknowingly followed, no different than picking up their accents of
speech for you to talk.
If the cliche "you have to walk before you can run" is valid, then how can you not assume
the world's best runners learned by watching the world's best walkers around them? If babies
truly learn to walk through observation, then it explains how the girls who followed in their
mother's footsteps were able to figure out their biomechanical advantage and carry their
firewood as efficiently as their mothers do.
According to Pohl's article, even the women themselves don't know how they walk more
efficiently. If the women themselves don't know how they do it, then how can they teach
it? How does each successive generation of women learn this walking skill without any formal
teaching?
So why wouldn't it seem logical that the boys observed their mothers as well and learned to
apply their more efficient walking biomechanics to running? They may not understand their
better efficiency because it wouldn't be until improved nutrition could be applied to their
biomechanic advantage that they found themselves ahead of the world's running pack.
Everything you learned about running, I believe you learned from observation, and isn't
"a natural gift" of talent as some profess. If girls from Kenya can learn a completely different
way to walk through observation only, then it proves who learns from whom. That to me is the farce
of running experts telling their followers to mimic children as running models.
I have yet to meet a child who's won the Boston Marathon, so what makes them authorities on
proper running technique? They struggle with the balance skills to carry a glass of milk
across the kitchen without spilling, so where does anyone get the idea to let them teach
you how to run? Or is it the experts want you to justify your own inability to run.
Our running technique hasn't changed for over 3.5 million years. From
fossilized footprints in stone as proof, "experts," have danced around trying
to come up with new ways to say the same thing over and over again and still
get published. The experts haven't done anything new, and the untold story of
the Kenyan women only proves that they really don't understand how we can walk
and run let alone why we walk and run the way we do.
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