The running fever – truth and hyperbole

Airtel 2011 half-marathon

The Airtel Delhi Half Marathon – one of India’s big running events – just finished on Sunday (27th November). With thousands of participants, it was a huge affair, a celebration of running. The logistics and infrastructure required were mind-boggling, for an entire city had to be brought to a standstill to hold this – traffic closed along the route, policemen deployed, medical personnel stationed, and nearly every civic agency involved in its conduct.

India has only lately caught on the running fever, and Indian cities have only recently begun to understand the many benefits of staging such runs. Apart from encouraging a healthy activity, there are many side benefits that accrue – the city gets to showcase itself to an international audience as a tourist getaway, and there indeed is a small local economy that gets galvanised during the event.

But beyond these things, what are we to make of endurance running? We cannot overlook the companies that most stand to benefit from a boom in running – the sportswear manufacturers. So are these events just an elaborate exercise perpetrated by the sports shoe companies? Why did endurance running suddenly become a ‘healthy’activity? Is running long distance (10K, Half-Marathon, Marathon) really beneficial to the human body?

There is no doubt that the current rage for running has been fuelled by sports shoe companies. What began as a simple rubber-soled shoe slowly began to take more complex, and ever more expensive, forms. Models would stay in the market just long enough to build demand among customers, but then would be taken off the shelves, so that customers would seek newer models.

A recent book, called ‘Born to Run’ by Christopher McDougall, completely overturns the claims of the shoe companies. McDougall begins by raising a simple question – if all shoes are as effective as they claim, how come serious runners complain of foot ailments all the time? How come some of the greatest distance runners, such as Emil Zatopek, used nothing more than simple canvas shoes? To answer these questions, McDougall seeks out the famed and secretive runners of Mexico – the Tarahumara.

The Tarahumara live in one of the most dangerous and inhospitable habitats in the world – Mexico’s Copper Canyons. Forced to retreat over the centuries into the most inaccessible parts of the canyons, mainly because they have suffered persecution over the centuries from colonialists, drug lords and other war-mongers, the Tarahumara have somehow maintained their great ability to run over astonishing distances – 100, 200 or even 500 kilometres, making them the greatest runners of the world.

The Tarahumara tribesmen

What makes this particularly interesting is that they wear no running shoes, but just a pair of traditional sandals. McDougall sets off on a journey to explore the various facets of long-distance running, and concludes that modern sports shoes are just a big hoax perpetrated on a gullible worldwide community.

The sports shoe, according to some researchers, does not really absorb the shock of running – it rather transfers the shock back to the human leg. Besides, since its design alters the natural running style of the wearer, it inevitably results in injury.

McDougall argues that nothing can be more advanced than the human foot for running; it requires no additional support. That’s why the greatest runners in the world are still from the remotest and most undeveloped places – like the Kalahari,whose bushmen have been known to hunt antelopes by running them to death. Indeed, he shows, humans reached the pinnacle of evolution mainly because oftheir running ability, for it is only in endurance running that we are as good, if not better, than any other species.

During the course of his research, he stumbles upon runners who prefer to run barefoot, or use just a thin sole to protect the foot, and this community is growing. Even as people voluntarily run hundreds of kilometres for the kick of participating in the sport, a new philosophy is growing that one can manage with the equipment that nature has provided. Perhaps we should seek out the running people of our homeland – like the rickshaw-wallahs in Kolkata, who run vast distances every day with nothing but the barest of footwear.

The big brands in shoe manufacturing

Where does all of this leave us? Do we look suspiciously at all that’s happening as a mere marketing and sportswear hyperbole?

Not everyone is taken in by the claims of McDougall’s book. The top African runners at the TCS World 10K last year dismissed all talk of barefoot running. Few competitive runners have won elite endurance events barefoot (Abebe Bikila and Zola Budd are two of the well-known names).

Most barefoot advocates, apparently backed by research findings, harp on the ‘heelstrike’ of a shoe-clad runner — that is, the shoes’ thick soles apparently cause the heel to strike the earth first, rather than the toe. They claim that the human body is naturally conditioned while running to a forefoot strike, and those used to a rearfoot strike are more prone to injury.

But these claims and studies have been hotly contested. Several other research studies have apparently concluded that there is no reliable connection between foot strike and injury, and that the benefits of a forefoot strike are exaggerated.

Experienced Indian runners prefer to adopt a wait-and-watch policy. Like the fascination for high-end shoes, barefoot running too might not be as good as it is assumed to be, for the human body has degenerated physically since the hunter-gatherer days and to suddenly try to leap back in time might actually create more problems than it can solve. Those seeking to run barefoot are therefore advised by their more experienced counterparts to make a gradual transition.