Why runners get hurt is a question that occupies my mind almost constantly. It’s amazing that so simple an activity can cause so many problems for so many people – for example, the scientific literature reports injury rates ranging from about 20-75% of runners in studies that have been conducted to date. In my quest to better educate myself on the topic of running injury, I decided to accept my friend Dr. Mark Cucuzzella’s offer to head down to Sheperdstown, West Virginia this weekend to Adidas Superstar Mujer attend a 3 day conference/course on prevention and treatment strategies for running injuries. Put on by the RunningClinic.ca, the course should be a great learning experience for me, and my intention is to blog about the experience while there and/or after returning home. Stay tuned!As part of the weekend event, Mark also invited me to participate in a public forum called “The Re-Evolution of Nike Air Max 2017 Donne Running: Discover Pain Free Movement for Life.” This event will be held at the Bavarian Inn in Sheperdstown, WV on Friday, January 28th from 7:00-9:00 PM.As runners, we often want concrete, black and white answers to questions about things like shoe design, running form, training methods, and so on. Does running in a minimal shoe make you less prone to injury than running in a traditionally cushioned, Nike Air Max 270 Mujer heel-lifted shoe? Does switching form to a Nike Air Max Classic BW midfoot strike make you faster? Nike Air Max 2017 Dam Will wearing compression sleeves make you recover faster after a race? Unfortunately, answers to questions like these aren’t simple, often because there are too many competing variables that make clear-cut conclusions difficult. Furthermore, an answer to one of these questions might not apply to to every single person – humans are variable, and changes will affect people in different ways. A given shoe might be great for one person, but terrible for another – it’s really hard to say what the result will be with any certainty.As an example, I ran the Manchester City Marathon last November in a fairly minimal racing flat (Saucony Grid Type A4). My legs suffered during the race, and I irritated something in Nike Air Max Classic BW Hombre my left foot which cause me some trouble for about a week afterward. The easy and most tempting conclusion was that the shoes were to blame – I wore a flat for a very long, Nike Air Max 90 Hombre intense race, and it was the wrong choice. However, the culprit could just as easily have been the difficult, hilly course combined with the fact that I had just run an intense, BQ effort marathon a month before. In fact, in reading my race report from the same race the previous year, I experienced similar leg issues in Saucony Fastwitch lightweight trainers, which are much more cushioned and have a standard heel lift. Furthermore, a few weeks before the Hartford Marathon in 2009 I had irritated my foot in seemingly the same way as I did in Manchester, so maybe Nike Air Max 95 Dam I’m simply susceptible to irritating what I think is my peroneus longus tendon. So where does this leave me? It leaves me to conclude that I have no idea exactly how I hurt my foot, why my legs suffered, or whether the shoes were to blame or not (or how much blame I should attribute to them). Such is the difficulty of Nike Air Vapormax Mujer trying to pinpoint clear causative factors when it comes to running injuries and the like.One way to get at answers to questions like these is to turn to scientific experimentation. If we could run more controlled comparisons and hold as many variables constant as possible, maybe we could come to firmer conclusions. Nike Air Max 270 Womens This is great in theory, but even science has its limitations. Let me walk you through a hypothetical example. Suppose we were interested in whether a given shoe could encourage a flatter, more midfoot foot strike (a very big goal for a lot of people these days, and a big marketing claim for manufacturers). Let’s take the two shoes I mentioned above, the Saucony Fastwitch and the Saucony Grid Type A4. Both are very Nike Air Max 270 Femme lightweight, but they differ in some basic structural properties. The Fastwitch has a standard heel lift, whereas the Grid Type A4 has a much lower heel (see pictures below). We could have 20 people run by Nike Air Max Classic BW Hombre a high-speed camera in each shoe, measure the angle between the foot and ground for each, and compare the results between the two shoe conditions.