Rating: WARTY!
I'm not a runner although I do really need to get back to exercising more this year, but I was intrigued by what this author had to say and in the end I have to report disappointment. My version (more on this anon) is 320 pages of largely fluff, with occasional interesting bits sown throughout, but you have to read very closely and pay attention to catch those bits as they fly by in what seems like nothing but an endless prologue. I've never read a book that seemed so intent upon disguising the very topic it claims to promote.
Let me say up front that all this business about 'chi' and 'prana' and so on is patent bullshit. There is no such thing. If there were, scientists would have found it by now. The author claims early in the book that "Chi...generates movement in the physical world and is that which animates life." If by 'chi' the author means adenosine triphosphate then they're correct. If not, then this is pure nonsense! What's really confusing though is that the B&N website has two print versions of this book, each with a different cover, one having 320 pages, the other having only 288 pages. The one with fewer pages costs two dollars more. Why? It's chi! Don't question it!
None of this necessarily that the author has nothing valuable to say about improving your running technique. For e, the problem was that even when the book confined itself purely to that, it often made no sense. The author at one point was talking about two forces that are claimed to be at play when you run: gravity, and the road! I'm sorry, but these are the same thing. To be more specific, there is only gravity (and yes, there's your kinetic energy as you move forward, but that's not what's being talked about). Gravity is what pulls you to the road, your legs are what propel you up from it. The force of the road is no more than the resistance of it to gravity trying to pull you down to the center of the globe!
Worse, the examples serve only to obfuscate, not clarify. One of the important points that is made is that you should move your feet to support your body, so you land with your foot flat underneath your center of mass, rather than stretch it out to land on your heel or your toe. This is the main secret to preventing leg injuries such as shin splints and knee problems we're told, but the example used here to illustrate it is the Warner Brothers cartoon Road Runner about which the author says "He had a great lean, while his feet are spinning behind him." Now I personally claim no great insight into the Road Runner's gender. The author seems quite certain, but I'll let that go.
The thing is that this idea of the feet behind the body is precisely the opposite of the technique we're supposedly being taught, which insists that your feet land directly under you. That's the chi running technique in a nutshell, FYI: let your body lead, pulling you forward, and as gravity pulls it down to the ground, place your feet directly under your center of mass to keep your body from falling. In this way you can, we're assured, improve your running and avoid injury.
The problem is that you're still moving your legs forward and pushing off the ground and you can only do this with your toes. You do have a certain amount of momentum once you get going, but without that propelling leverage off the ground with your toes on each stride, you will stop! Or fall flat on your face if you quit putting your feet under you. One or the other. The explanation we're given claims that you really don't need to call upon your leg muscles to run, which is nonsensical throughout, and you cannot run without injury if you're trying to propel yourself forward while your foot is flat on the ground. That for sure will injure tendons.
The author doesn't quite get the first law of motion as expressed by Isaac Newton. It's really the definition of inertia, which people too often mistake for a couch potato, but inertia doesn't mean unmoving, it means unchanging in terms of motion: not only things which are sitting still remaining at rest, but also things which are in motion remaining in motion until and unless they're acted on by an unbalanced force. So the author's right in that your body will not move unless you employ your legs to move it (in this scenario), but this is in direct contradiction to claims at other points in the book that you don't need to hit the ground with your feet to propel yourself forward!
There are pictures in the book aimed at illustrating the techniques discussed, but those often are unclear. One of them which was clear refutes this claim about landing on the flat of your foot rather than your heel, because the third picture in the sequence (figure 57) shows the heel of the foot hitting the ground first! Figure 59 of this same sequence of six photos, shows the leg pushing-off with the toes, so the images that supposedly show the correct technique show the very thing we're purportedly being warned against! Either that or the explanation we're being given is, again, obfuscatory rather than explanatory.
Some of the illustrations themselves are problematical in another way because, as for example in figure 42, the illustration has light text on a light background which is impossible to read. Another (figure 41) which supposedly shows correct technique, has a circular diagram at the lower legs, showing (we're expected to believe) the circular motion of the feet, but feet do not move in a circular motion when running. The foot that's in the air in this image isn't going any higher. It will not complete a circle before hitting the ground again! It's going to swing back and hit the ground in the shortest way possible. The feet therefore move much more like a pendulum below the clock, not like the hands on the clock face! If the author had something else in mind, it was not clear from the writing.
So I have to say I cannot recommend this book at all. Maybe if you're really interested and can get it for free or at a close-out, it may offer useful tips for you, but for my money, I pass. The book does not.
