Landstuhl CrossFit

Every year, anywhere from 65 to 80 per cent of all runners suffer an injury. No matter who you are, no matter how much you run, your odds of getting hurt are the same.

But is proper training the whole story?? Christopher McDougall’s article expresses many of the concerns of Dr. Lon Kilgore in his “Running the Wrong Way?” CrossFit Journal article (not free). Christopher McDougall’s article is worth your time to read in its entirety, but here are some key excerpts to perk your interest:

Despite all their marketing suggestions to the contrary, no manufacturer has ever invented a shoe that is any help at all in injury prevention.
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If anything, the injury rates have actually ebbed up since the Seventies – Achilles tendon blowouts have seen a ten per cent increase. (It’s not only shoes that can create the problem: research in Hawaii found runners who stretched before exercise were 33 per cent more likely to get hurt.)
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In a paper for the British Journal Of Sports Medicine in 2008, Dr Craig Richards, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed there are no evidence-based studies that demonstrate running shoes make you less prone to injury. Not one.
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It was an astonishing revelation that had been hidden for over 35 years. Dr Richards was so stunned that a $20 billion industry seemed to be based on nothing but empty promises and wishful thinking that he issued the following challenge: ‘Is any running-shoe company prepared to claim that wearing their distance running shoes will decrease your risk of suffering musculoskeletal running injuries? Is any shoe manufacturer prepared to claim that wearing their running shoes will improve your distance running performance? If you are prepared to make these claims, where is your peer-reviewed data to back it up?’
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Dr Richards waited and even tried contacting the major shoe companies for their data. In response, he got silence.

McDougall’s article continues with some advice on selecting the correct shoe and how often to buy new ones (he does not advise barefoot running for those of us who didn’t grow up accustomed to it). In making the decision on which shoe to buy, keep in mind a simple truth discovered back in 1989, according to a study led by Dr Bernard Marti, the leading preventative-medicine specialist at Switzerland’s University of Bern, on 4,358 runners in the Bern Grand Prix, a 9.6-mile road race:

Runners wearing top-of-the-line trainers are 123 per cent more likely to get injured than runners in cheap ones…Runners in shoes that cost more than $95 were more than twice as likely to get hurt as runners in shoes that cost less than $40.

So buy cheap shoes.
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Finally I offer you a video provided on the CrossFit HQ Exercises & Demos page, where Brian Mackenzie critiques Running Shoe Technology in his typical (explicit) colorful fashion: [wmv][mov] Your thoughts? Post to comments.