performance. It’s not about the shoes. It’s about you.

It is really a combination of arches: the medial longitudinal arch, lateral longitudinal arch, and anterior transverse arch—analogous to a suspension bridge or a leaf spring in a car.

Problems are going to keep coming. Each one is a gift waiting to be opened—some new area of performance you didn’t know you had, or some new efficiency to be gained.

Although your body is designed to last you 110 years, you can shred through it in 20 if you try hard enough. If you have a multimillion-dollar contract in place, there may be room for debate. But if you’re running for the sheer love of it…what then?

These new shapes and tendencies of your tissues and joints are no longer conducive to running. You must now be reborn to run.

Your tissues will be healthy and hydrated, and the surfaces between your tissues will slide and glide rather than stick like Velcro. Your joints will be in their proper positions. Normal range of motion will be restored so that your ankles, knees, and hips work the way they are designed to, unleashing your full power and minimizing the destructive

As Christopher McDougall describes our ancestors in his book Born to Run, running was hardwired in such a way that it was indispensable to survival:

The real game-changer is the attitude we adopt in our lives as runners: the conviction that we are responsible for taking care of our running machines like a master mechanic would.

The glutes are the largest muscles in your body, and if you put them to full advantage (a life of sitting in chairs can impede on the magnificent flow of power that your posterior chain was engineered to channel), you will be using muscles that are relatively inexhaustible.