92 Year Old Woman Finishes Marathon!

HONOLULU -- Gladys Burrill wasn't thinking about breaking a world record when she power-walked and jogged through the Honolulu Marathon at age 92.

But Burrill, a part-time Hawaii resident nicknamed the "Gladyator," learned soon after finishing the Dec. 12 race with a time of nine hours and 53 minutes that she likely qualified for the recognition. Her advice for others wanting to live a long and healthy lifestyle? "Just get out there and walk or run," she said Monday. "I like walking because you can stop and smell the roses, but it's a rarity that I stop."

Do Barefoot Running Shoes Really Work?

By: Dr. Robert A. Kornfeld

Barefoot running shoes are designed to re-create a "natural," barefoot running dynamic on "unnatural" surfaces like concrete, asphalt, red top, black top, etc. How can we have a barefoot running shoe? Doesn't barefoot denote without shoes?

Choosing to run on non-yielding surfaces without the protection afforded by proper running shoes can be harmful to the foot and ankle and cause even more problems downstream from compensation patterns. So what really are these pedal marvels and why is everyone running to take their shoes off?

Barefoot running shoe manufacturers believe that the human foot, unimpeded by synthetic surfaces and restrictive running shoes, should function at its best. That is a correct assumption, save for the fact that the human foot was designed long before the paving of roads. In fact, uneven, grassy surfaces are the most natural surface for the human foot because it helps the body navigate and respond to uneven terrain, while at the same time absorbs shock, stabilizes weight and propels the body forward. In order for this to occur successfully, most of us are born with a flexible forefoot and a rigid or stable rearfoot. In other words, at heel strike -- when your heel hits the ground -- your leg from the hip down is aligned for optimal function and is stabilized during normal walking.

So who should be using barefoot running shoes? The answer is very few people should. Only those people with stable (not flexible) first metatarsals will do well with these shoes, as well as those with very powerful lower leg musculature (although even those with powerful lower leg function will ultimately go on to some type of pathology).

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Running Barefoot is Better

Mother Nature has outpaced science once again: the bare human foot is better for running than one cushioned by sneakers. What about those $125 high-tech running shoes with 648 custom combinations? Toss 'em, according to a new study published online January 27 in the journal Nature(Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group). "Most people today think barefoot running is dangerous and hurts," Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, said in a prepared statement. "But actually you can run barefoot on the world's hardest surfaces without the slightest discomfort and pain…It might be less injurious than the way some people run in shoes."

Lieberman and his group used 3-D infrared tracking to record and study the running and strike style of three groups of runners: people who had always run barefoot, people who had always run with shoes, and people who had switched from shoe to shoeless. They found that when runners lace up their shmancy sneakers and take off, about 75 to 80 percent land heel-first. Barefoot runners—as Homo sapiens had evolved to be—usually land toward the middle or front of the food. "People who don't wear shoes when they run have an astonishingly different strike," Lieberman said.

Without shoes, landing on the heel is painful and can translate into a collision force some 1.5 to 3 times body weight. "Barefoot runners point their toes more at landing," which helps to lessen the impact by "decreasing the effective mass of the foot that comes to a sudden stop when you land," Madhusudhan Venkadesan, an applied mathematics and human evolutionary biology postdoctoral researcher at Harvard who also worked on the study, said in a prepared statement. But as cushioned kicks have hit the streets and treadmills, that initial pain has disappeared, and runners have changed their stride, leading to a way of high-impact running that human physiology wasn't evolved for—one that the researchers posit can lead to a host of foot and leg injuries.

Born to Run

"Biomechanical research reveals a surprising key to the survival of our species: Humans are built to outrun nearly every other species on the planet over long distance." -Ingfei Chen

The standard explanation among anthropologists has long been that early hominids left life in the trees to forage on the increasingly open savanna and that walking upright was key to surviving in the new environment. This biped gait led to a new means of travel, running. Homo erectus was most likely a long distance runner, either to escape predators or hunt prey to exhaustion. During this transition in our evolution our physical features changed quite a bit.

Most scientists reason that Lucy, the 3.2 million year old ape, with her chimp like build, could not have been a good distance runner. Her short legs, wide waist, long arms, and curvy fingers and toes, suggest a tree climbing lifestyle. More than a million years later Homo erectus roamed Africa with a much longer, leggier build and supporting many different attributes.

Development of abundant sweat glands and less fur allowed the body to keep cool over extended periods of exertion. Most animals pant to cool their body temperature, a cheetah for example, while extremely fast, will refuse to move once its' internal body temperature reaches 105 Fahrenheit. Our sweat glands and exposed skin allows us to control our body temperature while continuing exercise. We also developed an Achillies tendon. This tendon allows the body to absorb the impact of the body and spring us back into the air. To aid in the gait of running we developed a gluteus maximus and big knee joints, which gives the hip and knee joint the swinging motion. All of these attributes are specific to running, not walking. It is a very strong possibility that early humans ran up to 100 miles within 24 hours to hunt prey or avoid being killed.

Born to Run

Ingfei Chen

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