Ryan Bickerstaff

I went to the doctor (Dr. Saxena, who is one of the best foot/ankle doctors/surgeons and has worked with a ton of runners) last Thursday and had a bone scan done on Friday to see if I had a stress fracture to coincide with pain I had been feeling on the top of my left foot.  Luckily, the tests came back negative and there was no activity on the scan in the area of my third and fourth metatarsal.  Based on everything, the doctor thinks something went awry with my cuboid bone and that it would just naturally go away in another week or two and that there would be no harm in racing next week.  He said I should temporarily get some Superfeet insoles.  The green ones have tabs over the metatarsals and by taking the tabs off that correspond to the third and fourth metatarsals, some of the pressure is relieved.  He also said I should get some new racing flats…apparently the Air Streak Vapor’s that I have are only good for about 100 miles of running.  Since I use them for all my workouts and races, I think I was umm…a lot over that.

He also said that even though I was still feeling some pain, I should be able to run at 70% of my bodyweight.  Normally, dropping 48 pounds isn’t an easy thing to do overnight, but luckily, I have some help.  Sean Whalen, one of my friends and lab partners from college, started Alter-G, a company that specializes in anti-gravity treadmills.  Seriously, I’m not joking.  As you can see in the picture, a vacuum sealed bag surrounds you from the waist down.  The machine calibrates to your weight and then pumps air into the bag to create a pressure differential that lifts you up.  The level of precision is pretty high - speed adjusts up to 18mph I think in .1mph increments, incline adjusts by 1% increments, and you can decrease your effective weight by 1% increments all the way down to 10 or 20% I think.

It is an amazing piece of equipment for rehab.  Things like an elliptical try to accomplish the same thing (reducing the pounding on your feet/legs), but to me an elliptical is much more like bicycling standing up.  With the G-Trainer, you get to run with pretty much the same form as normal.  Yesterday I ran at 60% of my body weight at a normal aerobic pace and just felt some pain for the first few minutes of my 30 minute run.  Today, I split my 40 minute run between 12 minutes at 70% and then 28 minutes at 75% of my body weight and felt no pain.  I think the running in a less-pounding manner is helping me to work out out some kinks in my feet, get some blood flow down there, and definitely stay in better running shape than I would be otherwise.  I hope to be running on real land soon!  You should definitely check out their website - a lot of the top runners are using this to help add more training time with less risk of injury.

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