Stride

Almost nobody teaches people how to run. That is the observation this whole season comes out of, and it is stranger than it sounds.

We teach swimming. We teach the tennis serve, the golf swing, the freestyle stroke, in enormous technical detail, on the assumption that these are skills and that skills must be taught. Running we mostly leave alone. You are presumed to already know, because you have been doing it since you were two, and coaching consists overwhelmingly of how far and how fast rather than how.

In the Soviet Union in the 1970s, a young track and field coach decided this was a mistake.

Nicholas Romanov was born in Novokuznetsk, in Siberia, on the twenty-fifth of May 1951. He became a track and field athlete of some standing, with records to his name, and graduated with honours at twenty-three from the physical education faculty of Chuvash State Pedagogical University in Cheboksary. He spent 1974 to 1975 in the Soviet Army, then returned to the university to teach track and field and coach the team. In 1979 he began postgraduate study at the Central Scientific Research Institute of Physical Culture in Moscow.

The method he is known for he developed in 1977 and implemented with his own athletes through the middle and later part of that decade. He moved to the United States in the early 1990s, and the method spread internationally from there. He is living, and he runs a business built on it.

Because of that, I am going to handle this season a particular way, and I want to be explicit about it up front rather than have you notice and wonder.

I will tell the history. I will describe the ideas accurately, in my own words, because you cannot discuss a technique without describing it. I will not reproduce his written material, I will not use his trademarked name for the method as though it were a generic term, and the free tool this season points at is not named after him and never will be. It is called Stride and it teaches running technique, which is a thing that existed before anybody trademarked an approach to it.

That is the same posture I took with a living author in the attention season and a living coach in the bodyweight season, and it is the standing rule for this whole volume.

Now, back to the observation, because I think it is genuinely correct and it is why this method got traction.

Consider what happens when a recreational runner gets injured, which they do at rates that would be considered scandalous in most other activities. The standard responses are: rest, then a different shoe, then orthotics, then strength work, then a slower build-up. All reasonable. Notice what is almost never suggested: that they might be running in a way that is causing it, and that the way could be changed.

Romanov's argument was that running is a skill with a correct form that can be taught, that most people are doing it inefficiently, and that the inefficiency is where the injuries come from. Whatever you conclude about the specifics, the framing was a real contribution. It put technique on the table.

And here is the part that makes this season worth telling rather than just another method write-up.

He arrived at a set of specific claims about what correct running is. Those claims were then tested, in a proper laboratory, in a study published in a major journal. That is rare. Most of the methods in this volume have never been tested at all.

The results were genuinely interesting, genuinely supportive in one respect, and contained a warning that has been quietly dropped from almost every subsequent citation of them.

We will get there in episode four. First, the idea itself, which begins with the observation that you are already falling.

Next episode: falling on purpose.