During the early 1980s, I illustrated a book on running biomechanics that was authored by Dr. John Durkin (deceased) and famed running coach Joe Newton of York high school (also deceased). Durkin was a podiatrist to some world-class athletes including Sebastian Coe, the Olympic champion at 1500 meters. Coe had flat feet and kept getting injured. The man could leg-lift 700 pounds, but the force of his own body pounding along the track with a bad case of pronation was injuring his calf muscles. Newton was helping with Coe’s training leading up to an Olympic year, and he introduced him to Dr. Durkin to help with a chronic leg injury.
At that time that I met Coe at Durkin’s office, I was young enough that my feet weren’t giving me many problems. Thus I viewed Coe’s issues with a cold objectivity and was actually sworn to keep his flat feet a secret. This was pre-HIPPA laws I believe, but there are some aspects of privacy that are just plain common sense.
Truth be told, Sebastian Coe was not alone among world-class distance runners having injury problems. There were other top-flight athletes visiting Durkin for help. He specialized in making orthotics for runners and when runners experience success with any kind of treatment, word tends to get around.
Twinges
I’d had some twinges in legs and joints as early as high school. That’s when my dad fashioned a heel lift for my track spikes. He made it out of brush denim, a fashion favorite at the time. His engineering mind helped him structure the counterbalance in my shoe, and it worked. I was able to complete the season injury-free.
In college as a steeplechaser, there were plenty of times when my left calf would get injured from making that leap of twelve feet from the barrier to the water pit. But that injury was less about biomechanics and more about the extreme stresses of jumping from a 42″ barrier over water to land on an incline.
That injury would always heal up. Overall I was pretty lucky not to have many overuse injuries during the competitive years of my career.
And then I got older.
Chondromalacia strikes
Somewhere in my mid-30s, I started to notice a burning sensation under my left kneecap. It persisted for months. Finally, I bought this gadget called a Cho-pat knee strap that lifted the kneecap to keep the underlying cartilage from rubbing the wrong way beneath the patella. That worked for a while, but it was kind of annoying to run with that stupid strap on my knee all the time.
I finally visited Dr. John Durkin and got a set of orthotics. He was rather dismissive of my knee strap. “You’re not dealing with the source of the problem,” he told me. Durkin was a bit brusque in many ways.
The orthotics worked. My knee pain subsided and I actually increasing my running mileage for a while. Yet I was also a prisoner of sorts to the orthotics in my shoes. I could not go anywhere without them or the knee would start to ache under the patella.
No more sandals
That was a pretty profound lifestyle change in some ways. No longer could I wander around in summer sandals of any kind. I even wore the orthotics in my dress shoes. The problem with that strategy was the smell. The orthotics made by Durkin has an insole glued over the top of a plastic insert designed to keep my feet stable. All that running and sweat and confined spaces made those orthotics stink so bad they could kill small animals if I crossed their path.
I recall wearing them to a new job where I shared a space with another new employee during the first few weeks. The foot odor from my orthotics was so strong it was embarrassing. I tried everything from sprays to powders to keep it at bay. But all failed.
Round II & III
Finally, I went to see another podiatrist in 2002. He made some dress orthotics that had thin leather covers that never absorbed odor. Problem solved. I still have those orthotics and wear them daily. So I’ve certainly gotten my money’s worth out of them.
I even used them running for many years. That strategy worked until calf cramps took me down. Then I consorted with a pedorthist, Shelley Simmering, who built a new set of orthotics specifically for running. They are relatively thick and somewhat heavy, but they do the trick. I get them tweaked now and then.
Principles of orthotics
In case you are lucky enough not to need such devices, the basic premise of orthotics is simple: They put your foot into a neutral position so that your legs and knees do not have to compensate for the imbalances caused by structural faults in the bone and ligaments of your feet. While human bipedalism is a miracle of evolution, it is a far-from-perfect process. With 7 billion people in the world, the odds are plentiful that some of us will have feet that are either flawed from the start or develop problems over time.
Some medical doctors seem to scoff at the whole orthotic paradigm. A triathlon friend we call Dr. Joe has steadfastly refused to get orthotics even as his knees and hips give him problems. I also have a triathlete friend whose feet were aching. She tried orthotics for a while but then went into intensive physical therapy. That seems to have helped immensely. It was all about using strength training to compensate for the imbalances in her foot structure.
I rather admire those who refuse to go the orthotic route. Sometimes I look at the devices in my shoes as a ‘crutch’ of sorts, an affectation of purpose that is only necessary because I’m too lazy or busy or cheap to actually invest in the strength training that might cure the source of the problem.
Maybe so. But until then I’m grateful for the TEVA sandals that I own. They have a degree of arch support and I can wear them without typically sticking the orthotics inside the open banded sandals.
But good old flip-flops? Those don’t really work for me over any sort of distance or time. I can wear them in and out of the pool, or maybe to the beach. But the souls of those rubber floppers are largely safe from wear. In the game of sandals vs. orthotics, it is likely always the orthotics that will win.
Midway through this morning’s swim workout, I paused to glance at the lane next to me where my wife Sue was doing her 75m IM repeats switching from freestyle to backstroke to breastroke with each lap. She loves swimming, and grew up competing for clubs. Now she competes occasionally in Master’s meets. Mostly she swims to train for her Ironman events. This fall she’s doing the ocean swim at the Half-Ironman in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Sue’s not super keen on tossing me advice while we’re both swimming. Afterwards she’ll sometimes point out problems she can identify from one lane over. I just like the look of her in that sleek swimsuit, especially with the tan lines she just brought back from Florida. I’ll admit I like the feel of that good form.
Some players have taken their own lives as a result. Yet they are not alone in the game of football in dealing with CTE. Hockey players such as Daniel Carrillo, who played for several NHL franchise, has recently elected to donate his brain to science and the study of CTE. Carcillo was a hard-charging hockey player with more than 1400 collisions chalked up in his career. He also endured a few fistfights, if memory serves. 
I stopped to listen. There were discussions on how cellphones and social media apps and sites are specifically designed to produce an addictive desire to use them. We all might joke about the dopamine effect and how phones and apps work together to give us short little charges of chemical excitement, but our brains can get numb to the early levels and start to crave more. And more. 
That’s the question that has begun to bother me. It took me years to come to grips with aspects of my brain chemistry. Acknowledging and coming to grips with the conditions of anxiety and depression, and learning how to employ coping strategies to avoid ruminative or damaging thought patterns has taken hard work and years to accomplish. Sometimes when you change one part of your brain, the other part takes over. It’s like a traffic light. 
I was once addicted in some respects to running. It held up my self-esteem. Whenever anything bad in life would occur, or I felt like I needed a dose of self-worth to keep myself afloat, I’d pour my efforts into running. Often that resulted in some fine results. But of course they were fleeting, and deep down, few people really care if you’ve just won a local 10K. 
So I’m planning to partition my brain somewhat from the impacts of all this digital deference. That may involve blocking out portions of the day where I do not touch the most consistently used apps of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Linkedin. 
I’ve never really been an ass man, per see. But in this day and age, there are so many more asses on display thanks to changes in the fashion spectrum, it’s getting difficult not to be an ass man of some sort. Fashions from jean shorts to triathlon kits now provide ample opportunity to share ass cheeks with the world. It’s also no longer a taboo to do so. Asses are asses, and that is that.
Given their far more considerate nature as a gender, women seem to be able to appreciate and accept the whole lady ass genre as part of an evolution in spirit. There is both an appreciation and a liberation to not worrying whether one’s ass is showing. For women who want to ass it up as they run, ride or swim, such as triathletes or track stars, there are fashions that encourage full-on ass liberties. And among the women I know, they tend to say, 
To that one must reply, “You’re a hypocrite.” Because unless someone is disfigured by an accident or disability, everyone in this world; male, female or transgender, has an ass of their own. That’s both a fact of nature and a human right.
Last evening I was cycling down a country thoroughfare called Bliss Road (you’ll see the irony soon) during the opening miles of a 31-mile ride. The road crosses a bridge over Interstate 88 and one lane is closed to trafficto repair frost-related pockmarks in the road surface. The bridge needs to be closed on one side in order for the construction crew workers to do their job.
“Hey!” the guy inside the Vette shouted. Then he started gesticulating at the cars up ahead on the road.
His car actually got pinned in front of a truck that had seen his antics and was tailgating him to force him on down the road. That meant Blue Corvette Guy could no longer keep his eye on me in his rearview mirror. That must have royally pissed him off. The one thing a vigilante craves is having the target of his ire in sight.
This morning I ran what might possibly be the slowest three miles I’ve done in a long time. Along the way, I chanced to look down and see a flattened turtle on the gravel shoulder of the road.
It helps me a bit these days to realize that not all the dinosaurs are actually extinct. Turns out birds are basically dinosaurs that survived the weaning throes of evolution. Now, you’d think that it helps that birds can fly. But that’s no promise of survival either. Those of us who run and ride find plenty of flattened birds out there on the highway. All it takes is a fatal swoop of a bird over the road and the game of life is over for that individual. Smack.
As a viewer of the HBO show Westworld and previously, the popular television series Lost, I willingly suspend some levels of critical analysis about the premise of these shows. One can’t dig too deeply into the context or it quickly collapses. The idea instead is to absorb the characters and draw meaning from the allegories these shows present. The shallowness of such engagement becomes its own passion. The characters in many cases are shunted back and forth in time, the better to understand the depth of their experience.
The Westworld lesson
I specifically recall a moment when there was a choice to be made during high school. I was offered a chance to go on a rafting trip with a teacher who was leading a trip during spring break trip to the Big Bend area of the United States.
New worlds 
In the age of smartphones, Garmin devices and software that can measure everything from your heart rate to the watts you’re pumping out, the question still remains: how do you view progress? Is it all digital? Empiric?
The same sense of change happened in the pool this morning. For the first time ever, I slipped into the water and swam with confidence and strength from the warmup of 400 meters to every single interval I did. There were many moments when the pull phase of my stroke was increased in terms of force and rapidity and it didn’t produce fatigue. My long intervals of 400 and 200 meters dropped in relative time from all previous workouts. I could feel the progress.
A half-mile into the run I spied a small dog poking around in a wet ditch. The owner was up on the trail. When the dog spied me I called out “Hi pup!’ He bounded up the bank and ran right over to me, falling over on its back. I petted his furry belly and he spun around to face his owner as if to say, “Look at what I found! A petty-person!”
Emerging from the woods puts me out on the restored prairie that now stretches a full mile out to Bliss Road. This is where the trail opens up and the skies reach down and kiss the grasses. During a lifetime of visiting this preserve, I’ve watched this section of field converted from busy farms fields to tall prairie grasses.
As I trotted north past the parking lot and turned out on the gravel path to head west and south again, I could hear the voices of dickcissel calling. These birds look like small versions of meadowlarks and they repeat their names ad infinitum into the wind…”dick cisss cisss cissl”
I ran through a low brushy area of grass and forbs and where both male and female bobolinks jumped up from a plat of exposed soil. The male’s voice while singing on the wing is a rambling, tumbling series of whistles and chucks. With its black belly and buff-colored neck, white patches on the wings and rump, the male looks like a bird formed upside-down. But that coloration functions well on the prairie when the males rise up and circle to define their home turf. Their bold markings are visible from hundreds of yards as they fly in fluttering circles singing their heads off. Let us never forget that its a competition out there.
I was somewhat slower in my 5K this past weekend. Last year at the Race to Market I managed a time of 20:50, which is a sub-7:00 mile pace. This year coming through the knee surgery in April I lost some training time, especially speed work, and ran a 22:26 on the same course this year. I got out in 6:47 and then slowed.
Tired legs
We Run and Ride 