In the Words of a Champion (Salazar)

Salazar entered coaching and tried things like red blood cell saturation, fatigue analysis.  The MOST bang for the buck came when he simply critically looked at his athlete's form!  

Looking back, Salazar blames his form for his decline. “The way I ran, it wasn’t sustainable,” he said. “The attitude at the time was: if you were gifted with perfect form, great. If you weren’t, you were just kind of stuck.” While a runner with an awkward stride might win a few races, Salazar argues now, he’s ultimately doomed to break down: “The knee injury, the hamstring injury—in hindsight, these were the things that killed me.”  Salazar found his running performance unsustainable:  

Salazar’s interest in form began in 2006. Watching a race on TV, he was struck by something distinctive in the stride of an Ethiopian racer named Kenenisa Bekele, the world record holder in both the five thousand metres and the ten thousand metres. Scrutinizing Bekele’s body on the screen, Salazar noticed that he didn’t arc his back leg up slowly between strides but instead retracted it sharply, like a piston. “While all these other runners had long, trailing legs, his foot was coming right up to his butt,” Salazar recalled. “I thought, Is that just coincidence? Or could that perhaps be part of why he’s so good?

The fastest finishers had a higher thigh drive, for one thing; at its apex, their femur bone was almost parallel to the ground, like the front legs of a bounding deer. They also slapped the ground so quickly with their forefoot that the contact seemed almost incidental. According to Walker, the short slap transfers force more efficiently, shooting it from the ground forward into the pelvis, rather than allowing it to dissipate in the flex of the foot. The effect, Walker says, is like “a pogo stick with a stiff spring.” He explained, “You want the chain of force to travel from the ground through the body with minimal energy loss. That’s what it means to run efficiently.”Read more 


I think about my feet barely swiping the ground beneath me as I run (esp at speed).  When things are just right I am brushing the ground like a 3" paint brush.  ..Stuff to think about from the pros.

Marketers Sprint to Join Lightweight-Running Craze

lol, 'pumagility', 'reeflex'.  These PR firms weigh in on this sudden surge of minimalistic footwear, it's a game changer to be sure:


"Once you've made the transition [to a minimal or lightweight product] it's difficult to go back," said Katherine Petrecca, collection manager for New Balance's minimal line. "What will happen in the more mainstream channels remains to be seen, but in performance and specialty channels, it's here to stay."


New Balance, which launched its Minimus collection in March, used 3point5.com, a training portal, to educate store employees, and is running an ad campaign with the tag, "Like barefoot only better." It also has "how to transition" guides at point of purchase. 


Puma will be launching a lightweight-training product dubbed "Pumagility," supported by a campaign that will include TV buys. "[The space is] very cluttered, so we have to bring our point of view. You have to start doing things a little bit of-calendar to build some buzz and excitement," she said, acknowledging that Black Friday and the holidays are not typically major marketing periods for performance footwear.


Reebok also plans to dial up ads around the holidays, re-airing TV spots that supported the launch of its ReeFlex lightweight product earlier this year. The campaign, which turns the 76 "sensors" on the bottom of the shoes into animated "running buddies,"


entire article here