Journalist Chris McDougall wondered why he was getting hurt when humans have been running for two million years. His best-selling book, Born to Run, is a well-told tale of people who run barefoot without getting hurt and of researchers who discover a paradox: support can make you weaker, not stronger. The more support a running shoe gives you, the more it weakens your foot, ankle, and calf muscles and the more prone you become to injury.

McDougall presents the stories that led to the science and the science that has led to a resurgence of barefoot or minimal shoe running. He visits the Tarahumara, an impoverished clan of long distance runners living in the very remote Copper Canyons of Mexico. McDougall romanticizes their lives, describing men and women of all ages routinely running for dozens of miles in sandals over hot, steep mountains.

Scientists have studied the Tarahumara for years because their isolation makes them good subjects. As roads arrive, the Tarahumara embrace modernity: their diet goes from corn meal and long runs to pickup trucks and Hohos. Epidemiologists have documented the diabetes, cancer, and heart disease that result. McDougall looks past this, focusing instead on the propensity of the canyon-dwelling Tarahumara and some of their more crazed gringo brethren to race ridiculous distances wearing heuraches cut from old tires.

Back home, McDougall consults a Stanford track coach who refuses to let his athletes wear expensive running shoes and discovers data suggesting that both the extent and severity of injuries go up with the price of shoes. He interviews Daniel Lieberman, a Harvard biomechanics professor, who explains precisely how the support a of a running shoe makes most runners over stride and heel strike, which delivers a much sharper blow than a barefoot runner who lands mid foot. A good video of Lieberman explaining his research is below. The peer reviewed work is here in Nature.

Lots of testing and learning is still being done both by individuals and by researchers, but nobody these days takes for granted that running shoes are always helpful. Shoe companies are trying to shift their designs and their message to promote “minimalist” shoes, some of which are now best-sellers.

Is this just a fad? Of course any shoe can become a fad if well marketed. On the other hand, humans have run barefoot for two million years but have worn running shoes for only about 30. I would not bet against barefoot running, given the injury rates that shod runners experience.

Protection turns out to be deceptive. It seems completely normal to me that as a runner, I would prefer a protective shoe. I want lots of cushioning. I want to avoid pronation, which must be awful because it sounds so bad. It would be simple to sell me orthotics — hey, my knees hurt sometimes. Although some people surely do fine in running shoes, for many people, highly protective shoes are like a cast. They reduce your mobility and your foot gets continually weaker as a result.

Economists, of course, know that protection often makes competitors weaker. They believe instinctively that competition strengthens counterparties, be they muscles, individuals, teams, companies, or regions. I have even argued that those who want stronger labor unions need to force unions to compete. Economists left and right can show that trade protection weakens both parties, although this knowledge never stops companies, communities, or workers who are hurt by trade from seeking it. Doubtless some similar principal applies to parenting: too much protection weakens your kids. Fine, now buckle your damned seat belt.

To evaluate social programs or parenting, we need the equivalent of the Tarahumara — a group isolated from extraneous influences that can test whether social protections produce more benefits than costs. Fortunately, an impressive young economist has shown that many of our protective programs are testable. Esther Duflo is an MIT professor, a MacArthur genius grant winner, and the winner of the  2010 John Bates Clark Medal for the best economist under the age of forty. Watch her fascinating TED talk on how she tests programs to fight malaria, educate kids, and immunize children. This is barefoot economics at its best.

Testing of this sort requires an appetite for failure. Politicians, business people, and scientists each approach tests differently, depending on how failure affects them.

• Politicians pay a huge price for failure. This forces them to simplify problems and promise sound bite solutions. If they do not do this, they won’t be elected and they won’t be politicians. Politicians cannot say “wow, this is a tough problem. Let’s try a bunch of things, fail at most of them, and learn what works.” Most politicians suffer from what Tim Hartford calls the “God Complex”. Hartford writes the Undercover Economist column for the Financial Times. He has published a terrific book called Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. You can get a flavor of his thinking at his fantastic TED talk. The God Complex is the equivalent of intelligent design: certainty that complex systems can best be managed centrally and that complex questions can be answered without the painful process of trial and error. Parents, CEOs, physicians, gods, and anyone else who pays a high price for failure are especially vulnerable.

• Business people embrace trial and error mainly because markets force them to. Hartford notes that ten percent of all businesses fail every year.  A market economy can be looked at as a huge, ongoing experiment that evolves, like every complex system, because of variation and selection. The best leaders of complex systems acknowledge that leading edge problems don’t have obvious solutions and encourage a structured process of trial and error. Hartford’s book discusses the value of lots of small, low cost trials that are decoupled so that they don’t spill over and of carefully documenting and interpreting results. An important and highly recommended read.

• Scientists love failure. It’s how they learn. They understand that humans have evolved as complex systems through millions of years of variation and selection. They reason either deductively from data or inductively to ask have we evolved to run? Evolutionary biologists have long noted that the unique way we sweat for thermoregulation, our hairlessness, our odd bipedal design (more energy efficient than any quadruped), our unusual ability to breath multiple times per step, and our highly engineered feet, ankles, and hips all suggest anatomy designed to run.

But until the 1980s, researchers were stymied by one big problem: we are slow. Why on earth would running matter, when every mammal worth eating can outrun us? 

It fell to David Carrier, a graduate student at the University of Utah, to notice something that had escaped other scientists: we are built for endurance, not for speed. The case for humans designed for endurance running is now widely accepted. This is partly because we have discovered a story that backs the data. Hunter-gatherers in the central Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa still practice persistence hunting: they run their prey to death (there is one other group that practices persistence hunting — or at least remembers it. Our pals the Tarahumara). Running down a large mammal takes as little as an hour or as long as 8 hours, but if a human can keep a mammal galloping so that it cannot catch its breath, cool down, or rejoin its herd, it will collapse of exhaustion before the human does. It appears that before we invented spears, humans survived by high-endurance, persistence hunting. Barefoot.

The BBC managed to film a group of men in the Kalahari hunting a kudu this way. Despite the drums and the breathless narration, it is a stunning film. Notice that the runners are shod in cheap shoes that do not let them heel strike. They look a lot like the sneakers we all wore as kids.

Share/Bookmark

They also produced a video on how they produced the video. Worth a look.

Share/Bookmark

THE ROMANCE OF BICYCLES

Most bikes sold in most stores have a racing heritage. These don't — they are designed to be incredibly practical. They each let you ride comfortably upright, with your bars at least as high as your saddle. Nobody on these bikes will be confused
with Lance Armstrong and they are likely to enjoy their ride a lot more as a result. When John Kennedy said that "Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride" he was not fantasizing about clipless pedals, carbon fiber frames, and aero bars.

These are deeply romantic bikes — the sort that caused novelist and poet Christopher Morley to declare bikes "the vehicles of novelists and poets" and H. G. Wells to declare bikes a cure for Melancholy. "When I see an adult on a bicycle", he later claimed "I do not despair for the future of the human race."

These are what what we used to call "touring" bikes and what many Europeans think of as normal: a steel frame, a long wheel base, a leather saddle, racks, fenders, comfortable tires, and bags. The prettiest one even has lugs (artistic steel joints) where the tubes come together. They are the profoundly useful bikes meant to cover long distances in comfort — the sort of bike that caused writer Iris Murdoch to observe that while "other forms of transportation grow daily more nightmarish, only the bicycle remains pure in heart". Grant Peterson, a local hero who founded Rivendell Bicycle Works, makers of the orange bike, got it right when he called them "rideable art that can just about save the world".

These bikes can shape your dreams. You come to understand what Wells meant when he claimed that "After your first day of cycling, one dream is inevitable…You ride … on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow."

GLOBAL ECONOMICS

These four bikes are produced in a global supply chain by companies that target well-defined markets. All were designed in the US (two in Minnesota, a region that now plays a surprising role in the US bicycle industry.) Three of the four frames are manufactured in Taiwan, home to several high quality frame makers.

Frames make the bike and quality frames have migrated from the US to Japan to Taiwan.They are now heading for China. Walmart sells a highly credible Chinese made commuter bike for $185 and they sell a lot of them. Chinese bicycle factories are not the Dickensian nightmares of yore and the Chinese themselves no longer ride Flying Pigeons seemingly welded together out of scrap plumbing supplies. At least one high volume frame plant I visited in southern China is modern, clean, well-lit, and staffed by people who have learned from their Taiwanese customers how to steadily improve quality and productivity. Just as "Japanese" went from being a brand liability to an asset, "Made in China" will soon be one or two models down from premium, which will be made in Taiwan.

In contrast, all four bikes use leather English saddles made by Brooks, a 20 person company in Birmingham, England that has hand made the same product for more than a century. Brooks was recently purchased out of bankruptcy by Selle Italia, an Italian saddle maker famous for sexy racing saddles. They have introduced some terrific new products, including an expanded line of women's saddles.

Which posed a thorny marketing problem: how do fashionista Italians shake up an effete British product with small, loyal, conservative following? Click here to see the advertisement that sold a lot of saddles and told the world that Brooks was no longer standing still. (Test: if you ogled the interrupteur levers, cantilever brakes, and mixte frame in that photo, you are as sick as I am).

CYCLING INNOVATION

Each of these bikes is the product of a different kind of innovation and entrepreneurship. Each, believe it or not, is aimed at a slightly different market (notice that each bike has a different handlebar. This is not an accident).

The second bike from the top is a Steel Independence from Independent Fabs in Somerville, outside of Boston. The team there first came to cycling fame as Fat Chance cycles, makers of
premium mountain bikes. I lived in Somerville in their early years and visited the shop — it was as chaotic and energetic as any Silicon Valley startup. Today, Independent faces a tough challenge. They do not have the low overhead of artisanal frame makers nor the efficiencies and distribution available to larger companies. As a result, the Steel Independent frame costs twice as much as the other bikes in this picture. In fact, if you disguised the frames, most riders under most conditions would have a hard time noticing the difference between a bike built on this lovely $2,000 frame and a bike built on one costing half as much.

This problem keeps Grant Peterson of Rivendell Bicycle Works awake at night. I am passionate about Rivendell bikes and have owned several. The bikes are testimony to Peterson's engineering, aesthetics, and unyielding, point of view.

Richard Schwinn, grandson of the founder, once termed Rivendell "a religion masquerading as a bike company". He had a point. Peterson has been a proselytizer for practical bikes since the 1980s, when he designed bikes for Bridgestone that are still highly sought after. He favors  lugged steel, wool clothing, leather saddles, beeswax, fenders, polished Nitto stems and racks, and bags of his own design. (He loves bags and is brilliant at designing and marketing them. Once he
created a line of three bike bags and named them Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe after the
Cartright brothers on Bonanza. I owned one of each and when I finally
sold them on eBay a year or so after they had been discontinued, they fetched far more
than I had originally paid, so powerful has been the lure and the logic
of the Rivendell brand).

Grant is a also a champion of good handlebars and
personally designed the fantastic "mustache" and "Albatross" bars on
the bottom two of our four bikes. He dislikes Lycra, clip-on pedals,
undersized frames, and the influence of racers on his industry. He works
with a team in a crowded warehouse behind a car rental office in Walnut
Creek and they build outstanding bicycles. Literally everything they sell is well thought out.

But great design and branding includes a cost structure designed to hit a target price point. Rivendell has built its business on frames by Toyo. Years ago, Peterson got them to make a wonderful frame called the Atlantis (Grant's is pictured above). The Atlantis is an all-round bike that is heir to the legendary Bridgestone X0-1, an earlier Peterson design that is now a cult bike. The Atlantis is Rivendell's best seller and I ride mine with a passion.

But a built up Atlantis now costs more than some school teachers take home in a month. Worse, I cannot risk locking it up outside of a store in Oakland. So I am selling the Atlantis, and replacing it with a used Surly Long Haul Trucker with scraped off decals.(The herd will not be without a Rivendell however. The Toyo-made Rambouillet stays because it's a road bike that I rarely lock anywhere).

So what exactly is a Surly Long Haul Trucker? That would be the bottom bike in the photo. And you wouldn't know to look at it, but it is a cousin of the bike on top, the Civia Highland. Surly has been extremely successful and the Civia, which just launched, will be as well (I rode my first one yesterday in Palo Alto). 

Civia and Surly are both from Minnesota because both are owned by a bike company that even bicycle fanatics don't know much about: Quality Bike Products. QBP is as a parts distributor that figured out that in the bike business, shipping parts to retailers, and retailing itself isn't terribly profitable because it doesn't add a lot of value. Value in the bicycle business is captured by companies with really smart brand and product development skills. This requires three things that do not often go together: passion, discipline, and focus.

QBP seems to have all three. Few cyclists realize it, but they have built several of the finest brands in cycling by noticing niches, designing great products and brands, and using their distribution advantages to quickly grow profitable companies.

QBP saw prices rising on Japanese bikes and quality rising on Taiwanese parts and created Surly to make sturdy, no-frills steel road, mountain, and cross bikes. They saw the (frankly imbecilic) tendency for tattooed urban GenXers to ride fixed gear track bikes ("fixies") and they created All-City. (Hey, whatever gets you on your bike….). They have long owned Salsa Cycles, which make premium bikes, mainly  carbon fiber or aluminum. They spotted a surge in cycling related to environmentalism and commuting and aimed the Civia, at the high end of this market. (They are right about the energy efficiency of a bicycle. A famous Scientific American Article by S.S. Wilson in March, 1973
showed that a human on bike gets more miles per calorie of energy than
any animal or any known machine. Others have calculated that cyclist get the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon).

QBP creates these separate companies like a bicycling venture incubator in the middle of Minnesota. They have assembled the expertise and distribution to identify markets, design products, and deliver them very quickly and in a very focused way. Not all of these companies will or should succeed, but it's a fantastic business model and, in its own way, as exciting as Rivendell.

Share/Bookmark

This is pretty amazing…

Share/Bookmark