The Next Best Thing to Bicycling Part I

No doubt you are reading this because you saw the title and you are wondering “What is the next best thing to bicycling?” No I’m not talking about sex. After bicycling, the next best form of transportation is running, pure and simple. When I’m not biking I like to run or walk briskly to my destination, and I also like to run just for fun.

Like bicycling, running has fallen out of favor as a valid means of utilitarian transportation and is nowadays considered exclusively an athletic pursuit. Runners these days also suffer from an unexpected handicap: the shoe. That’s right the shoe. And in particular the running shoe.

No doubt you are now thinking “How could the very item designed to facilitate running be bad for runners?” Don’t take my word for it. Just ask the growing number of runners who are eschewing traditional running shoes for “barefoot running shoes” or even actually running barefoot.

It’s not that shoes are intrinsically bad. The problem is that they encourage us to land on our heels. This may be fine for walking. Or for carrying a heavy load. But when you run you need to land on the front of your feet. When you run you need to land on the front of your feet. Yes I repeated that last sentence because it’s important. I’ve learned from experience that the most comfortable way for me to run long distances is to lean back, take smaller faster steps, swing my arms side-to-side, and carefully place my feet flat on the ground over and over again. To go a little faster I can lean a bit forward and land more on the front of my feet. This is what I call the front-landing style of running.

That’s what I discovered works for me anyway. For a long time I didn’t understand why I rarely came across others who run the way I do. At my first marathon a few years ago I scrutinized thousands of my fellow runners as I ran. I saw only half a dozen or so that ran like I did. Was I doing it wrong? Or was this another case of me being right and almost everyone else on the planet being wrong?

I am by no means an athlete. But I am very good at analyzing bodies in motion. When I see how someone moves I can copy their motion and come to understand it. (This ability comes from my modern dance background.) When I started running seriously a few years ago I tried copying the heel striking running style that I saw others doing. It was a disaster. I got pains in my shins that took months to heal. My feet felt beat-up. I retreated back to the front-landing running style that I had developed. I made up a few exercises to help me (which I’ll go over in Part II of this post). I paid attention to my front-landing running style and I found there were many advantages:

• It is easier to run uphill. Try landing on your heel when going uphill–it’s awkward.
• I have more control running downhill. Heel-striking causes you to lean forward when running downhill and it takes a lot of effort to slow down. But front-striking allows you to lean back to slow down, or lean forward to speed up as you desire. It’s like your whole body is a big gas pedal.
• I enjoy a continuous range of speeds from walking to running. With heel-striking I find I can either walk briskly or engage my thighs to run, but there is not a smooth transition between the two. With front-landing I am much more nimble speed-wise.
• I have more muscle-use options. I find heel-striking tends to use only my thighs and knees. With front-landing I can shift to my thighs/knees for sprinting and shift back to my calves/ankles for distance. For a short burst of speed I can lean way back and engage my gluteus maximus (a.k.a. butt muscle). They don’t call it maximus for nothing!
• With front-landing I can better negotiate rough terrain. Try jumping between boulders and you’ll see what I mean. First of all you can’t begin a jump from your heel. Secondly if you land on your heel it’s easy to slip. If you land flat-footed you are more secure.
• With front-landing I can breath more deeply while running. Do a big yawn right now. (The power of suggestion is powerful isn’t it?) Let your arms do what they want. Did your elbows come up to shoulder height and did you push back your shoulders? This is the posture that’s possible when you’re front-landing, leaning back, and inhaling. Now exhale. Notice how you rock forward. This rocking motion between inhaling and exhaling is not possible when you’re heel-striking because it’s difficult to lean back.
• I have less injuries. I find the loping gait of a heel-striking running style forces me to put my legs way out in front of me. This lets gravity pull sideways on my ankles, knees, and hips. The quick short gait of a front-landing running style keeps these joints aligned below me. And the springiness of my calf muscle protects me from injury better than the cushioning of a running shoe can.
• I suspect that front-landing is a more efficient running style. When I run this way I don’t bob up and down as much as other runners I see who are heel-striking. The next time you are out running look at a runner who is in front of you. Can you see the bottoms of their feet? If so they are wasting a lot of energy by picking up their feet so high. Another reason I suspect front-landing is more efficient is that it can be very quiet. Do your feet make a slapping or thumping noise when you run or walk? That’s a sign of inefficiency.

That is certainly a long list of advantages that I discovered. Why couldn’t I find others who had also made these discoveries? Then a couple of years ago I heard about Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run. My friends told me that I might like it. I rushed to the bookstore, bought a copy, and read it cover-to-cover. The book describes how we are creatures designed for long-distance running. That is our special skill in the animal kingdom. We used to use this skill for persistence hunting: running down large game until it fell over from heat exhaustion. Why then does long-distance running seem so difficult? The book further describes how in the 1970′s running shoes came to have heavily padded heels. Coincidentally with the introduction of this type of shoe came a dramatic increase in the number of running injuries. The book describes how the author, after suffering from injuries, adopted the front-landing running style. He describes how this is the same running style used by the race-winning Tarahumara Indians. As a finale the author and his friends join the Tarahumara Indians in a joyous ultra marathon.

Since Born to Run came out I have seen an explosion of interest in the front-landing running style. It is gratifying to see I’m not alone in the way I run. However, it is disturbing to see how the movement is unfolding. For one, people seem to be focusing on the barefoot aspect rather than the front-landing vs. heel-striking aspect. When I first saw the  FiveFingers toe shoes made by Vibram I thought “It’s not about the toes, it’s about the heel! Tell them about not landing on their heels!” The shoe companies have the difficult job of diverting our attention from the fact that they have been selling us injury-causing shoes for the last 40 years. And they are in another awkward bind: how do they stand to profit if runners all decide to run barefoot? They are tripping up all over themselves with innovative marketing schemes. This is their chance to capture a new growing niche market. They have the difficult task of applauding the barefoot movement and discouraging it at the same time. They accomplish this by pushing what they oxymoronically call “barefoot running shoes”. I sense that people are buying into their marketing but not changing the way they run. I am shocked to see people wearing these shoes who apparently have no clue about how to land on the front of their feet when they run. I’m concerned.

My own contribution to the front-landing movement (which I’ll deliver in Part II of this post) will be to describe the training exercises I came up with. I’ll also describe my thoughts about breathing and about running shoes. In the meantime, imagine this “cargo running” scenario: you have a nearby errand to run and you don’t have much to carry. You definitely don’t need a car. You don’t feeling like biking. And you don’t even really feel like wearing shoes. Start running. Not because you’re in a hurry. Not because you’re trying to lose weight or train for an athletic event. But because you need to get somewhere and it feels good to get there by running.

The Most Heroic Hero of the Decade, Maybe the Century

If you are Quaker (as I am) the biggest thing to shake up Meetinghouses and make young friends’ hearts throb all over the country is Jon Watts. I first heard about him when his video “Friend Speaks My Mind” made the rounds around Ithaca Monthly Meeting. Besides being very funny, with lots of Quaker in-jokes, this video had a further resonance for me. It single-handedly brought into the open an issue that has been festering unspoken: are all Quakers Christian? I’ve longed to affirm in some way that I am a Quaker but not a Christian for a long time. But I was always afraid that others in the Meeting might be offended. Jon finally puts into words what so many of us have been feeling:

I’m not a Christian but I’m a Quaker
I’ve got Christ’s inner light but he’s not my savior

So that’s number one why Jon’s my hero. Number two I discovered reading the Xtracycle forum Roots Radicals. Someone mentioned a young man riding an Xtracyle Radish from Richmond to Boston on a music tour. Sure enough: Jon Watts! Furthermore, he’ll be going through this area. You can read about his tour on his blog. I am looking forward to seeing him at the Farmington-Scipio Spring Gathering. Why is he biking? He writes:

Why not just drive a car like any other rational American would?

It would be easy for me to spout off a guilt-based justification about how quickly our society is killing the Earth, and how each of us is individually contributing a great deal to that destruction by owning and over-using personal vehicles. And it would be true. I do feel guilty and hypocritical about simultaneously mourning the destruction of the natural world and contributing to it.

But the deeper reason why I am riding my bike the 600 miles to Boston: I find driving, for all of it’s convenience, to be spiritually deadening. So let’s turn the question on it’s head… why, when I could be actively using my body, engaging with the land and the environment around me, viscerally feeling the miles go by underneath me, and genuinely living would I isolate myself in a sound-proof, wind-proof, experience-proof chamber?

Why in the world would anyone do that?

German Bike Paths Rock!

I’m reading the book Rowed Trip by a couple that rowed and biked from Scotland to Syria in 2008. When they were biking they towed their custom rowboats behind their bikes, and when they rowed they stowed their folding bikes in the hold of their boats. Cool.

I was particularly interested in how the biking situation is in Europe. I have this idea that the Europeans are way advanced in that department. Certainly their biking experiences in remote areas sounded nice. They described single-lane roads which they had pretty much to themselves, seeing only a few cars per day. But other areas sounded nasty. They described narrow roads which pimply teenagers used as race tracks. However, when they reached Germany they wax poetic:

…my spirits were buoyed by…the fabulous condition of the bike path. Even though it was wide enough for a car and paved, it was strictly for non-motorized travel. Regular signs marked distances to upcoming communities, while fruit trees and park benches appeared with regularity. I was happy to see the path was amply used by dog walkers, stroller-pushing mothers and touring cyclists, almost all of whom seemed intrigued by our road boats.

Cycling is big business in Germany. Every year millions of touring cyclists pedal along the nation’s 50,000 kilometres of bike paths. Not only is cycling an excellent way to discover a country, encouraging you to experience hidden gems away from typical tourist itineraries and to eat hearty meals with complete justification, it fosters a host of mom-and-pop businesses catering to the visiting pedaller. Small villages that would be overlooked by tour buses have bustling cafés, bicycle shops and accommodation geared to passing cyclists. The bed and breakfasts are wholesome and inviting, the kind of place where the hosts would yell at you in contented bliss and topple oversized swaths of fresh bread and farm cheese onto your breakfast plate. The pleasure of lengthy cycling trips on roads exclusively for human-power traffic is a foreign concept for Canadians. While we have the gorgeous scenery, long-distance cycle-touring in Canada involves sharing the roads with cars and trucks. The noise, fumes, and danger detract from the trip, and our experience in Germany made me realize what we’re missing. On bike trails, you can let your imagination wander without worrying about straying into the path of a semi, the birdsong comes through undiluted, and it is easy to chat idly as you pedal side by side.

…

When I praised the quality of the German cycling paths, our host related the origins of their cycling movement. In the 1970s, a group of students spearheaded a drive that ultimately led to a pace of bike-path construction exceeding that of roads. Since 1976, the total length of cycle routes in Germany had quadrupled from 12,911 kilometres to by some estimates about 50,000.

Canada has a few quality bicycle paths, but they are not interconnected, and for most randomly chosen A-to-B trips, a cyclist is forced to follow busy roads. Whereas in Germany, a pleasant bicycle path can be found connecting most towns. In 2007 Colin and I cycled in the Pacific Rim National Park on the west coast of Vancouver Island, a world-class tourist destination, and we encountered some or our most dangerous cycling conditions ever. We’ve cycled through Third World countries with a better shoulder for cyclists than those found around Long Beach. When we queried the park officials, they insisted the environment couldn’t take the extra burden of a track catering to fossil-fuel-free vehicles. The highway and numerous vehicular parking lots are the limit of what the park can handle. The Canadian government could learn a lot from the Germans.

Germany’s abundance of cycling paths is a case of “if you build it they will come”. In Münster, Germany’s most cycling-friendly city, bicycles are used for one in four trips. By comparison in Canada’s most pedalled city, Victoria, B.C., only one in twenty trips are made by bicycle. On average, 10 percent of trips in Germany are pedal-powered, which is five times higher in Canada and ten times higher than the United States or the United Kingdom.

I wasn’t surprised to find that more  people cycle here as to discover it hadn’t always been that way. The advent of the automobile led to a precipitous decline in cycling in Europe, which would have undoubtedly continued if it hadn’t been for concerted efforts. In the 1950s, cycling in England was more popular than it was in Germany, as the Germans fully embraced the automobile industry, building world-class autobahns and mass-producing cars. Interestingly, grassroots efforts in Germany began breathing life back into cycling as an alternative, while Britain continued catering almost exclusively to the car. It’s hard to say what cultural forces spawned such differences, but these two European nations, both with strong economies, now have distinctly different cycling habits. The Brits are tied with Americans in their rejection of the bicycle, while Germany is a world leader.

The thing is, people don’t want to ride their bikes if it elevates their chances of dying or being maimed, and that is a real likelihood in the U.K., U.S., and Canada. If you ride your bike in the States, you are seven times more likely to be injured and 2.5 times more likely to die than if you ride in Germany—a factoid that may help explain why in America 75 percent of cyclists are male, while in Germany and the Netherlands, the number of women on bikes is equal to our surpasses that of their mail counterparts.

We were usually the only foreigners on the bike paths and felt as though we had discovered a national secret.

In my estimation Colin and Julie Angus, the authors, are nothing less than heroic. We saw them speak at the National Geographic Society in Washington D.C. last November. The Society had awarded them Adventurers of the Year for 2006. They are professional adventurers who don’t hesitate to row across the Atlantic or do other such impossible-sounding feats. Colin and Julie are leading the way for the rest of us who embrace human-powered transportation. I hope that some day people will react to seeing a bike towing a rowboat not with an incredulous snort but with a yawn while they mutter “there goes another couple biking and rowing across Europe”.