Since posting the piece by Roger Robinson on training and racing for “elder athletes” there has been a lot of off-line chat and discussion around training in general.  Something else is coming soon regarding the matter of training at an advanced age, while avoiding the injuries that can befall anyone yet are so much harder to deal with as you get older.

In the meantime, I wanted to alert you to some information posted by a frequent correspondent, Dr. Mark Cucuzzella.  Mark is a physician, a very fine distance runner and most interested in the bio-mechanics of running.  Below is a bit of a teaser, and a link to the blog (Zero Drop) where his post appears.  The following post and link are reproduced here with the permission of Mark Cucuzzella.

Dr. Marck Cucuzzella

Does Dr. Mark Cucuzzella, 43, ever have time to sleep, take it easy, relax?  He’s a highly accomplished marathoner (2:24 PR), race director, family physician, Associate Professor at West Virginia University School of Medicine, Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force Reserves, and owner of Two Rivers Treads, a Center for Natural Running and Walking, in Sheperdstown, West Virginia. The store opened last May and is the nation’s first retail outlet (it also sells online) aimed specifically for the minimalist and barefoot-running shoe crowd, featuring Newton, Terra Plana, Inov-8, Kigo, Sockwa, as well as low-profile models from Saucony, New Balance, and Brooks. The store also carries healthy, functional children’s shoes from Terra Plana Vivo kids. Cucuzzella is passionate about many things—but getting injured runners back on their feet is right at the top of his list.  To this end, he is one of the main guiding forces of a new state-of- the-art running conference, to be held on January 28-30, and which will offer talks and workshops on running injury prevention, gait mechanics, and rehabilitation.  While Mark clocked 2:34 in the 2010 Boston Marathon at age 43, he used to be an injured runner.  How he got to where he is now—pain-free and a true pioneer in the natural running movement—is the subject of the following personal essay that Mark wrote for Zero Drop.

****

So why would a Family Doctor be researching running injuries, experimenting with all types of running techniques and shoe designs, and even open a store selling only flat shoes in his free time?  The answer is a quest to run completely pain free and with effortless efficient function with big toes that do not bend and in the more challenging mission to share the hard lessons learned to others wanting to keep moving for life.  For more, click on the link for Zero Drop.

I will be posting more from Mark in the future.  In the meantime, there is much food for thought in this linked post.