50+ Masters Training and Racing Open Forum

I was in Eugene and feeling frisky so I went by the Nike Store and tried out a pair of the VP Next% ran on a WoodWay treadmill.

Next%$ First Impressions just standing in them I almost skipped running but....

Cushy but a bit unstable, high stack but I am not used to high stack heights , rigid sole and steep curve from mid foot to toe off.

Woodway Treadmill WOW first time ever running on a Woodway Loved the feel but which part of the cushion bounce was from the mill and what part from the next%$ is a mystery cause I did not run in a normal shoe on the WoodWay.

Ran 1 mile quarter warmup quarter at 9mph and half mile at 10mph ending HR was 153 which is about 75percent MHR for me. Which was pretty low really. Not winded still comfortable but feeling it.

So I bought the darn pink shoes outta green.

Five hours Later I noticed some pain in my left pf but none the next day. I might take them back here is why....

I probably can race a 5k 40 secs faster in these shoes based upon my little workout and interesting take Ross.

My Performance impression the faster the speed the better the shoe felt.

Ross evaluation article

https://sportsscientists.com/2019/05/a-short-thought-on-sport-evaluating-eliud-is-kipchoge-a-next-gen-202-marathoner-or-a-mid-204-runner-in-a-technologically-superior-shoe-who-knows/?doing_wp_cron=1557706729.1702349185943603515625

My Next% experience

Mid 50s male scheduled to run 2,600 miles in 2019 after running 1925, 1890 2265, 2115, 2100, 2100, 2200, 1950, 2500, 2100, 1750, 1000, 950, 580, and 200 in previous years. I ran a good effort in the Chicago Marathon at slightly over 3:30. I forked out $250 for a pair of Next% after seeing so many runners wearing them at Chicago. I signed up for a half marathon to try the shoes out before winter since I couldn't wait until spring. I ran 2 miles before the race to make sure my feet didn't object and test out the right socks. I did not taper as this was NOT a goal race and I ran 40 miles total for the week.

I started slow (7:25 pace) since my last serious half marathon was 3 years ago. Miles 7-9 dropped to 7:10, then 7:00 in miles 10 & 11. I finished with a 6:26 mile. My last 5K was 20:46, 1:16 more than my best 5K race over 9 years ago when I also ran 2500 miles. The 1:34+ half was my best effort in 7 years and at least 4 minutes faster than my A goal. I ran mostly by effort/feel and my legs felt great through the end and the following day. I was passing people left and right during the last half. I think I could have set a half marathon PR if tapered and paced myself better.

Was it the 675 mile step-up from last year, the shoes or just a placebo effect? Probably a combination. I usually run in cushioned shoes with a PF heal cup due to plantar fasciitis and intermittent achilles tendinitis. I don't wear hard leather sole dress shoes at work anymore because they hurt my plantar fascia. I don't run in my Nike Luna elite racers racing flats anymore because they don't have enough cushion and make my feet hurt. The Next% weigh 7oz compared to 9oz for my previous racing shoe - Brooks' Launch. If they didn't have thick foam, I probably couldn't run with a carbon fiber plate.

This was a sample size of one race. I am NOT a Nike fan, but I would happily pay $250 per race for the way my legs felt during the last 6 miles and at the finish. The 6:26 final mile (partially uphill) was completely unexpected. I am fired-up to keep my training going through the winter and squeeze-in a couple local races next spring before Boston in April.

Charlie, Peaky Blinders, and anyone else who's run in either the 4% or the Next%:

Do these shoes have a hard heel counter?

I have a bad chronic Achilles tendonosis/Haglund's deformity and the single most important feature of any shoe is how hard the back of the heel is. My favorite running shoe, alas discontinued, is the Nike LunarTempo 2 because of its very soft heel. Part of me says it's ridiculous for anyone as slow as I am to shell out $250 for a pair of shoes that might make me slightly less slow. Still, I can't help but wonder how much they might help me...

Thanks for the input PB.

Really would be interested in others who have tried the shoes with this foam/plate tech.

After some thought and curiosity I am going to try a little test since I plan on returning these shoes I will do this on a tread mill.

Setup:

Same 3 day prior routine just easy stuff

Same treadmill

Same warmup

1 mile at 10mph zero percent incline

Measurement in heart rate

Altra one one vs Next%$$$

WAG the HR delta 6 beats per minute or 5 percent

If I was seriously warped I would get a lactate meter to figure out HR at lt turnpoint then

run on a track exactly at lt turnpoint - 5bpm for say 10 minutes and measure the distance?

Bottom line is if I was not afraid of getting injured from these shoes I would enjoy using them for fun but I would not count my times or at least not compare my times with my normal shoe races. OTOH if someone beats me by a bit wearing these shoes that is a ok that is just good old competition bikes are a good example of this fast light expensive wheels are an advantage but so what.

Has anyone ever tried inclined bed therapy? Sleeping with your head higher than your feet? I thought I'd post it here as it seems like it has quite a few benefits for folks that are a bit older...which is most of us.

Here's an article:

https://inclinedbedtherapy.com/faq/what-is-inclined-bed-therapy-ibt/104-perseverance-with-inclined-bed-therapy-is-essential-for-healthy-sleep

The web site that contains the above article has a lot info.

Charlie...I'd like to know what you think...as you are an "outside the box" sort of dude.

I've been doing it for over a week. I started by raising the bed 4" so it wasn't too drastic. Now up to 6". Not running faster yet but do notice I feel much better when I get up and I don't have to pee so much during the night. Better circulation too. I'm hoping it eventually helps take some of the kinks out of my neck and lower back.

Nice report PB. The shoes are legal and there is no way they are being pulled so folks may as well go for it. I could give a damn about going faster (obviously, ha ha), but I’m actually really interested in whether they can reduce wear and tear on your legs. I mean, it seems like they may actually do that. I’d love to see a study on injury rates with those shoes, and/or the types of injuries they may foster/reduce. I was impressed to watch Nick Symmonds cut the things apart and there is really nothing obviously illegal in there. Just a very intelligent design.

Going by feel, measurable lap time improvement, actual race finish time and ease of recovery, I will continue training in my Brooks shoes, but will only run road races in the Next%. At our age, staying healthy is half of the battle.

I forgot to mention that it was lightly raining and 400 yards of the course was on grass, but I had no problems with traction. I don't know how these will work in snow. Also they stayed pretty clean and cleaned-up easily despite the conditions.

*******

The heels are a relatively soft flyknit material and a soft heel collar keeps your heel firmly in place without pressure, but you will have to try them on and walk around first to see for yourself. My heels are pretty sensitive too.

PTF been sleeping with a raised head board about 3 inches for 20 years high quality memory foam helps a lot.

RT that was why I wanted to try them but the instability concerned me. Just standing on one foot was tough wobble wobble

However Nike is coming out with a shock absorbing shoe that supposed to reduce all cause injury;) by 52 percent:

https://www.dezeen.com/2019/11/07/nike-react-infinity-run-reduce-injury/

amkelley wrote:

Charlie, Peaky Blinders, and anyone else who's run in either the 4% or the Next%:

Do these shoes have a hard heel counter?.

Re Nike 4%;

The 4%s have a very soft heel counter - same as what I call a heel cup? Although soft and maybe because it has stretchy slipper like fit, they seem to to provide stability.

AMK Next% improvements included stability and an unusual feature to keep the shoe off the achilles tendon. Here is a good article on the upgrades from 4 to next:

https://www.doctorsofrunning.com/2019/05/nike-vaporfly-next-review.html

IMO 4 or Next shoes might make your heel worse . Rubb and Jorgensen BOTH ended up doing Hag Def surgery AFTER using the 4/Next shoes. Also seems like injury rates went up with others Hasay for instance.

Good news is Nike is getting serious about shoe tech which means better shoes across the board. I really think mid sole tech tpu is going to make shoes way better . My issue is with the carbon plate which totally alters foot biomechanics

If I were you I would get the surgery;)

At 1-3 seconds/mile off the age group AR at 8K, 15K and HM over the past couple years could maybe benefit from use of the new shoes. Held out last year, thinking I wanted any times to be on the older technology; and besides the races I ended up doing were about competing, and time was secondary. The field has changed now, plus I'm a year older and time aside, I don't want to head into a big race knowing that another runner has maybe a 5 second/mile advantage. So if i get back to good health in 2020, I'll be looking at something be it another brand or what's currently on the market. That said, I'm not sure if this stuff will hit XC, and that gives incentive to focus on that. Where the competition, tactics, and grit matter most, not the shoe technology.

Charlie wrote:

IMO 4 or Next shoes might make your heel worse . Rubb and Jorgensen BOTH ended up doing Hag Def surgery AFTER using the 4/Next shoes. Also seems like injury rates went up with others Hasay for instance.

Good news is Nike is getting serious about shoe tech which means better shoes across the board. I really think mid sole tech tpu is going to make shoes way better . My issue is with the carbon plate which totally alters foot biomechanics

If I were you I would get the surgery;)

Indeed, the fact that both Rupp and Jorgensen needed that surgery after using the 4% shoes for a while is one of the reasons I'm really leery of trying them.

I've decided I'm not going to have surgery unless I can no longer run without it. As it is, my Haglund's/Achilles problem (which I've now had for 4.5 years) limits me somewhat, but I seem to have learned how to manage it (knock on wood). I have never had an injury that required a complete hiatus from aerobic workouts; when I've had injuries that have stopped me from running for a while, I've always been able to cycle to maintain reasonable overall fitness. I'm really afraid that if I have surgery to fix my Achilles at age 61 and can't even drive a car for weeks, and can't run again for the better part of a year, I will never really be able to run again.

amkelley wrote:

I've decided I'm not going to have surgery unless I can no longer run without it........I'm really afraid that if I have surgery to fix my Achilles at age 61 and can't even drive a car for weeks, and can't run again for the better part of a year, I will never really be able to run again.

Amy, you probably know I've also struggled with achilles issues. Diagnosed as tendonosis. About as long as you. Almost to the point of giving running up. I have a perpetual limp most of the time. I still get in 35-40 miles/wk. Split between walking and easy(slow) running. The pain is a zero at times, a 3-4 at other times. Never excruciating but enough to really piss me off.

I stumbled upon this article the other day. It might be the most informative of the hundreds I've Googled. If you don't want to take the time to read it, scroll all the way down to the conclusion. I interpreted it as dismissing all forms of treatment, including surgery, except for eccentric heel dips, 3x15 twice a day for 12 weeks. Religiously. I've been doing them for years, stopping when things get better and slacking at other times. I see this as my last hope so I'll be doing them, as many as I can handle, everyday. Its also the first time I've read that you can run as long as long as the pain is under a '5'.

This will probably be the end of my running career if this doesn't end soon. I'll give it thru the spring so we'll see. I'm not going to run in pain again.

Dave

FWIW - Novice using the Next%

56M, 5'9", 152

Just finished my first marathon training cycle which pretty much went from July to Nov. I had been running on/off for the past couple years and have been trying many different brands/models of shoes, started keeping two or three in rotation over the last year.

Nike's marketing got the best of me, so I went and tried on a pair of Next% at the local running store thinking I might use them in my marathon. They definitely felt different from anything else I had run on. I went ahead and purchased them with the idea of running for about an hour on a treadmill that night and if I did not like them, try to return them or worse case pass them on to my son. I did need to go up 1/2 size.

On the treadmill I started at an 8min pace and progressed down to a sub 7 by the end of the hour. Not sure if it was the warm up, break-in, or the speed increase, but they definitely felt better later in the run than at the beginning. Decided to keep them.

I am not a real experienced runner, but I truly think there is something to the tech; although I am also inclined to believe there is a placebo affect as well. The couple training runs I did with the Next% eliminated the concern about my choice of shoe in my first marathon attempt.

My approach to training is my own, but figured I had 3 areas to work on to progress... cardio (heart/lungs), musculosketal (joints/tendons/ligaments/muscles), and the Mind. Being confident in my shoes was a big check mark in the Mind column.

Races & workouts leading up to the marathon made me think I could probably finish somewhere between 3:30 and 3:10. Since this was my first marathon attempt, I went conservative and targeted a 3:30 finish since that still had a possibility of being a BQ for my age group. While I wasn't planning on running with a pace group, I saw the 3:30 group about 30-40 feet in front of me in the coral before the start.

Ran the race entirely by feel. Ended up passing the 3:30 pace group about halfway through and finished in 3:15 and change. Negative split all checkpoints. Legs felt really good the entire time, unlike some of my long runs (20-22 miles) on different brands of shoes. The week after was a different story though, quads and hams were sore for about 3-4 days after.

The shoes definitely seem to wear quicker than others, but I don't have enough miles on them yet to know if it is cosmetic and/or functional.

on a side note - it's definitely inspiring taking up running at an older age - when everything is a PB/PR (because it's often the first time running a particular distance).

Now 20-30 seconds a mile or more on these shoes!

I don't doubt there is a benefit, but at this rate the records will fall by 10 minutes in the marathon and we'll have 50+ half marathoners going 1:03 - 1:04.

My Achilles tendonosis is insertional, not midpoint. Several months after this started I embarked on a program of eccentric heel drops and kept at it for a few months, and my heel only seemed to get worse. When I quit doing the heel drops it started to improve. Later on I read what the article you cited, and the one it cites, say: for insertional Achilles problems, do the heel drops only down to floor level ("flat" heel drops). I have not gone back and tried that, though.

My pain level is zero when not putting any force on the heel, 0-1 when riding a bike, and typically 1-2 when walking or running. It is worst 6-12 hours after a hard or long run, when it may creep up to the 3-4 category when walking. Any time it is "more sore than usual" the following morning, I take that day off from running. For most of the past 3 years or so that has meant running only 5-6 days per week, although I go through periods when it flares up and I have to basically stop running completely for a couple of weeks, and I also go through happy periods when I can run every day for many weeks.

It sounds like your injury is worse than mine, possibly just because you are fitter and faster (and presumably heavier?) and can apply more force to your ankle/heel than I can while running. Obviously if it gets to the point where running is usually too painful to be enjoyable, you should stop. I really hope you can get this figured out so that you can keep going.

I am not trying to start an argument about shoe technology, but instead I am offering is a link to a very interesting podcast about the Nike 4% and Next% .

It is IMO it is worth the investment of time to hear some obviously intelligent and educated folks discussing the materials, bio-mechanics, and physiology involved. The Real Science of Sport Podcast Professor Ross Tucker and Mike Finch - "The Shoe That Broke Running"

Keep an open mind.... Note, that it is about 1:20:00 long.

https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/the-real-science-of-sport-podcast/id1461719225

The "eccentric" program is the gold standard for rehabing all Achilles pathologies. I believe there's a study out there where a group of athletes that had sustained a complete rupture of Achilles were given non-surgical treatment with eccentric exercises being the mainstay rehab (after a few weeks of immobilization) vs another group of ruptured Achilles patients that had the standard surgery & rehab. The non-surgical eccentric group fared equally as good as the surgery group and were able to return to pre-injury activity with little or no complications. The only difference was the non-surgical group had a slightly higher incidence of re-tears than the surgical group. Of course, these were young athletes where healing is much more efficient and they don't have to worry about age-related degenerative changes of tendons & ligaments.

I sustained a "grade-2" partial Achilles tear during a track workout a few days after my 50th birthday! (59 now). 2 weeks of immobilization and 6 weeks of intense rehab with eccentric rehab being utilized everyday. Returned to pre-level in about 3 months. Still to this day, I do eccentrics everyday and one ice session per day and 2 or 3 sessions on running days. It does get sore on occasion and age-related degeneration is occurring as it has become restrictive in some of my activities (sprinting, jumping, backward movements, etc.).

I also sustained a complete PTT rupture of my ankle in conjunction with medial-column collapse and also dealing with post-traumatic osteoarthritis in one knee from a partial ACL tear sustained back in my old college football days in the early 80s. So, the Achilles is somewhat secondary to these other pathologies but nonetheless needs daily attention. And I find myself many times in Andrew Luck's description of his vicious cycle of "injury, pain, rehab." This is where getting old sucks for us athletes here. And these older people who say "you're really only as old as you feel" obviously are not athletes are engage in any high-impact sports.

But the biggest problem we older people will have with these chronic Achilles pathologies is fighting the age-related degeneration that's occurring anyway. And the stress of a high-impact activity like running doesn't help either in the long run (no pun attended). The science tells us that age-related tendon & ligament degeneration occurs the most with the rotator cuff, Achilles tendon, lateral humeral epicondylar tendons, quadriceps tendon, patellar tendon, ACL & MCL.

"With increasing age, these tissues are subject to vascular and compositional changes that alter their mechanotransduction, biology, healing capacity, and biomechanical function."