Among runners, there is a whole school of thought about the best way to run, which emphasizes landing softly, maintaining a high cadence (turnover of feet), short strides, and landing in the front- or midfoot. These schools include Chi Running and the POSE method. The hardcore fringe among this group are barefooters. (Actually the logical outcome of the recommendations of Chi Running and POSE is to run barefoot, they just never come out and say that, probably because they actually want to sell books and DVDs and not scare people off.) Anyway, a big mantra among all these groups that one should run smoothly – that all energy devoted to upward (vertical) movement is wasted energy – that one should never "jog." If you are jogging, your horizon is bouncing up and down, and you are not running efficiently, and are probably messing up your knees to boot. Of course, I take all of this with a grain of salt, but I am in any case experimenting with it all. Indeed from my barefoot running, I run with a style that my friends say is strikingly different than most people's.
Anyway, I think about all this advice with a chuckle every day on my bike ride to work through Arlington National Cemetery, because the U.S. Army has posted a helpful reminder to us all not to waste energy on unnecessary vertical movement while we are running:
Okay, so it's a bit of an inside joke for
barefooting nuts.
A side note: I was a little cautious taking this photo, because our whole country is still a little crazy and every tinpot security guard seems to believe they are empowered to order people not to take photographs in public places due to some vague "security reasons" (thousands of instances have been reported from all over the nation, many sillier than this would have been. Here's just one.) In fact, in almost all cases, one has every right to take photographs of anything on public property or visible therefrom. However, one possible exception to that can be on federal military bases, and a little research shows that Arlington Cemetery is owned by the Army. So just in case I scrutinized the rules and found no prohibitions on photography therein. In fact, there were guards about 20 feet behind me when I took this, at the gate (through which I had just passed) between the Fort Myer military base and the cemetery. Fortunately they were professional enough not to interfere with my picture taking. (As a matter of fact all the guards at Fort Myer and Arlington Cemetery that I have met have been professional, courteous and reasonable. Well there was the one guy who kind of freaked out when I said something about "more blood on Bush's hands" when a burial procession went by, but that was it.)
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