After your foot bones are in their proper position, the muscles are strong enough to support the foot without too much conditioning. Every find it interesting that people that have never worn shoes in their life never develop plantar fasciitis?

William Prowse
http://www.pfsurvivalguide.com

Thanks for sharing your story Bob. Your fix sounds somewhat like the advice that I think Chi running uses to relax the ankle when running, to basically shut off the calf and let the foot dangle from the shin prior to contact. I think a lot of people have a perception of forefoot striking that is like the way a ballet dancer runs with toes really pointed and this results in hitting the ground too hard with too much plantarflexion. Glad you found a way through PF!

A couple years ago I got tired of my more-frequent-than-not PF issues, and was also tired of hearing my friends whine about theirs (as I whined back in sympathy).

We were all focused on discussing the many available (and sometimes conflicting) forms of treatment, with the cause being some nebulous concept of “over-use” or “over-training” or simply “It just sorta started happening”.

I decided we needed to stop the cycle, and focus on identifying and eliminating causes of PF, and I was successful!

Not for everyone, but for my friends who shared my preference for a forefoot strike.

The main problem appeared to be with the strike itself (rather than the push). The one thing we all had in common, as we all trained to get faster, was that we were striking harder.

Which is only expected, right? Perhaps, but some of us (including myself) were extending our feet rather close to lockout, and we were jamming the ball of the foot into the ground, which transmits a sudden, sharp pulse to the PF.

The rest found themselves tightening the calf before impact (in anticipation of springing away).

I think both groups were doing the same thing (calf tightening), but with varying ankle position. Given the strong calves common to forefoot-strike runners, that’s sure to put lots of force on the PF at the time of impact.

When we were free of PF, we tried training on softer surfaces (sports fields and padded tracks), which helped. Unfortunately, all of the races we were training for were on roads.

A couple folks got Hokas, but didn’t like the perceived reduction in stability and the loss of feel for the road. (The mid-sole strikers who tried Hokas tended to love them.)

Clearly, we needed to let the foot “meet” the ground more gently, though we had no idea what that really meant, in practice.

We tried lots of ideas, the vast majority of which were either ineffective or foolish. The best we found was using a higher cadence, which seemed to help, but only a little.

Eventually I realized something quite simple: If the road was hard, it meant that our feet had to become “softer”.

That’s what a higher cadence was giving us, but it was a stop-gap measure, an aid, not the complete solution.

I was thinking about foot mechanics when I came up with a different approach: If the forefoot was striking too hard, why not delay the impact of the ball of the foot, and increase the duration of the initial contact? Go from a single contact point to a moving one, spreading the impact out in both area and time. So, I wanted to make initial, gentle contact with parts of the forefoot other than the ball of the foot, which is the definition of supination.

Well, being a fan of America’s Next Top Model (go figure), I instantly remembered how the models tumbled while learning the “Runway Walk”, where each foot crosses over the center line to massively increase hip pivot and sway. That severe line-crossing gait was massive supination (or a twisted ankle if you didn’t, and sometimes even if you did without weight shift).

If models have trouble walking that way, there’s no way we could run like that! Of course not. But we did try gradually bringing our foot strike closer to the center line until we could tell that the outer edge of the foot was making contact just before the ball of the foot.

We initially tried this while running at a relaxed pace (jogging) with a slightly elevated cadence, to minimize overall impact.

Generally, it was enough to try to run on a road or parking lot paint line to get slight but clearly detectable supination.

Then we gradually widened our gait back toward our customary widths while trying to retain that same softer feeling when making contact. Basically, we learned to roll our ankles slightly outward just before impact.

Of course, we promptly reverted to our old ball of the foot contact, but when this happened, we’d do a few steps of “model running” then try again. We made this part of our form check habits.

Then a day came we realized we had gone nearly 3 months without anyone in our group of forefoot-strikers whining about PF.

And none of us were overdoing our supenation, with no significant wear on the outside of our shoe soles.

I’m now nearly two years without any PF issues. The thing is, with my lifetime of long skinny flat feet, I’ve often had PF issues of one kind or another.

I’ve also come to believe that the supenation was a means to an end, more of a trick than a fix. What I believe has actually happened was that our bodies refused to slam the smaller foot bones into the ground, and relaxed the calf a bit before impact, and we in turn learned to better “catch” the post-impact energy with our calves.

I have no idea how to directly share this “calf catch” behavior: “Model running” seems to be an effective way to access that result.

During the past two years I’ve occasionally shared this with others, such as: “Well, when your PF heals, try running gently on a painted line, and see how that feels on your feet. If it feels better, then make your regular gait feel the same way.”

So far, I’ve gotten zero reports concerning any harm from trying this technique (though many quit because it felt “weird”), and over 50% of those giving it real try said they found at least some benefit from it.

Yes, that’s only anecdotal evidence, and possibly contains some Placebo Effect, but it’s what I have. And those folks did it on their own, without supervision, where our initial group worked together, observing each other and sharing perceptions.

My online searches yielded absolutely nothing about using slight supination to “soften” the forefoot strike for road runners. Nor did I find anything about slightly relaxing the calf before impact (less than full tension) to reduce PF injuries.

I’ve since changed the name from “model running” to “centered strike check” (less to explain), but the meaning is the same.

Did I just discover this? Or am I simply failing to use correct terminology in my searches?

What I’d really like to know is why so many of the forefoot strikers I know, including myself, strike harder when they try to go faster. It’s simply not needed!

You might look at something like the Altra Instinct Everyday. Altra may also have a few color options of the regular Instinct that aren’t too crazy. You could also check out the Merrell Bare Access.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moYSJBrPdHI

This explains it well: http://www.runresearchjunkie.com/the-windlass-mechanism-foot/

I have had a couple of minor flair ups since that lasted for a day or two but these never turned anything, I just kept training through these boughts and the problemed disappeared. Again using lots of very easy recovery runs seemed to enable my body to heal quickly.

I think getting the body in place that it heals efficiently is the key to PF, much like other injuries. Specific treatments to the area that ignore the rest of the body and lifestyle will not achieve the best results. Eat well, sleep well, be mindful and come down from life stressors quickly to a relaxed positive state. Exercise regularily but predominantly in a zone of low physical and mental stress, and use high intensity/high stress sessions sparingly.

In a hormone level one could view at very simplistic level as balancing Growth hormone vs Cortisol. Too much of the later and the body will steadily breakdown and injuries will appear first in the weakest link in the chain. The whole chain may well be weakened too and ready to break.

To recovery from this weakened state you need to keep Cortisol levels in check and make sure the body has time and rest to allow the Growth hormones to come an do they job in signally tissue repair.