Certitude, Part III

There are things in this world that I can't prove scientifically but know in my heart are true. For example, I'm certain that people who are afraid of the world and bitter about their lives are most likely to be both conservative and Republican. I can't prove it, but I'm sure I'm right.

I've recently become certain about something else I can't prove: It's better for your knees to walk wearing running shoes than to run wearing walking shoes.

Last May, I developed an enthusiasm for a routine known as high intensity interval training, which I wrote about at Hot Water Sandwich. It involved alternating short intervals of running with longer cool-down walking intervals. After a few weeks, I began to have pain in my left knee, which wasn't too troublesome as long as I was standing or walking, but was a real problem when I stood up after sitting for longer than ten minutes. The pain when I straightened my left leg and put weight on the knee was enough to make me wince. After a minute or so, the ache would subside. At any rate, as the weather grew warmer, the combination of summer heat and a sore knee led me to give up the running part of my routine.

Last week we got the first noticeable cool weather of autumn, and I realized I'd probably want to start running a little, particularly on chilly days. I decided to invest in my very first pair of running shoes, thinking that might prevent the hurt in my knee (which had diminished significantly after I stopped running this summer). I went to Academy and bought the least expensive running shoes on their shelves.

The first time I laced 'em up and started walking around, it was like bouncing on tiny trampolines. There was literally a spring in my step that I couldn't recall previously experiencing. Hmmm, I thought, maybe I shoulda tried this a long time ago.

In my neighborhood, the city recently opened a pair of trails through the wooded areas, and I enjoy the shade so much that I reconfigured my walking routes to include them. Since I couldn't measure the new routes with my car odometer, I began a series of measurements using stopwatches and pedometers, then calculating the distance based on averages and known quantities.

One of my most commonly-walked routes is 3.10 miles and requires an average of 6138 steps to complete. The first time I walked the route in the new shoes, it only took 5914 steps. WTF ? --- I knew for a fact the trail hadn't gotten shorter. Over the next few days, I started comparing the steps recorded on my pedometers to the averages I had calculated for each route when determining their distances, and in every instance, I was covering the same ground with fewer steps. I pulled out the calculator again and established that my stride had lengthened by roughly 0.6 inches, and the only thing that had changed was the shoes I was wearing. It'll take me more mileage to reach 10,000 steps, but that's a minor drawback to gain a knee that feels like it's only 35 years old again.