Lessons from outside the running world

This is going to be an interesting attempt at a blog.  One that takes seemingly unrelated subjects and ties them into my main focus, running. 

If you were to flip through any of the myriad of books I’ve read on some pretty random subjects, you’d see the margins littered up and down with notes.  If a stranger was to read them, they probably would make no sense, because they’re almost all about connecting whatever random subject I’m reading about back to running.  It doesn’t matter what the subject is.  Recognizing similar patterns in other subjects, or taking overarching themes and tying them to your specialty is key to broadening your horizons and not falling into the same dogma that gets presented over and over again within a specialty.  Making connections is a skill that should be learned.  Given that, I’m going to delve through several of my books and highlight some of the abstract lessons I’ve learned and what that means to my specialty, running.

This is somewhat related to a previous post where I gave my kind of overarching principles and rules for everything:

http://www.scienceofrunning.com/2010/04/my-rules-of-everything.html

The Sole of the Shoe: Looking at inside the midsole

The sole of the shoe:

With this whole barefoot/minimalist/running mechanics thing exploding right now, one fo the more productive outcomes in science is the realization that the body is smarter than we give it credit for.  All those old biomechanical models that presented the body as rigid mechanical body don’t quite accurately reflect what’s going on.  Instead, the body works in a nicely complex way where stiffness, tension, and muscle activity are adjusted on the fly based on feedback the body receives.  So it’s constantly calculating and preparing for what’s going on.  So that means adjusting for the ground surface type, the position of the legs and feet throughout, and so on.  Essentially, your body has an in built cushioning system.