Shoe wow! Springs kick off a running revolution

PROFESSOR Jim Richards’s catch phrase is “Engineering the champions”. He could not look less like a champion. Pony-tailed and a little pot-bellied, his job is to hone Britain’s elite athletes.

He is a biomechanical engineer who assists in running the school of sport, tourism and the outdoors at the University of Central Lancashire.

Richards and his team may have just come up with the greatest innovation in sport since William Webb Ellis picked up a football, or Pheidippides was sent from Marathon to Athens to announce victory over the Persians.

It is called “the Preston”. It is a shoe. Indeed, it is a rather natty lemon and acid-blue trainer that looks like a standard running shoe, but it has hidden springs in the sole. Not just any springs, but about 20 tiny galvanised steel springs that have been made by Harrison Spinks, a family-run mattress company in Leeds.

“What we wanted to do was to put things in place to reduce the chance of injury. Recreational runners — pavement plodders, if you will — sustain a lot of injuries from impact,” said Richards. “Think of a car’s suspension — you have a spring and a damper. If you took the spring out of the sus- pension you would have a very bumpy ride. You would go bang, bang over the potholes. Most footwear just has a damper, even the very whizzy expensive ones. They don’t have the spring.”

The team at the University of Central Lancashire has just thrown a mini hand-grenade into the £11-billion (R165-billion) running-shoe market, dominated by giants Nike, Adidas and Reebok. Each year they bring out more sophisticated soles, which include from “multi-angled forefoot gel pods” to microprocessors that adjust cushioning for every stride. And yet the rate of injuries never seems to reduce.

Indeed, Christopher McDougall, author of the influential book Born to Run, believes expensive shoes are themselves responsible. After all, in the era of Roger Bannister, runners wore thin leather slippers and appeared to have far fewer problems.

The sneaker only came into being in 1972 when Nike developed the “Cortez”, the first design that had rubber under the heel.

McDougall said barefoot runners such as the Ethiopian Abebe Bikila, who won the Olympics marathon in 1960 without shoes, were less prone to injury. —