Born to Run and the Bern Grand Prix Study

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Barefooters
Aug 24, 2015
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Actually, I bought Born to Run by mistake. I happened to catch the second half of the excellent documentary "The Perfect Runner" by Niobe Thompson on a public tv station. A few weeks later I was looking to buy it and confused the title when I thought I had found the book to the movie, happening upon McDougall's book. I have made worse mistakes and practically swallowed the book in two days. What an interesting mix of adventure and information! It quite confirmed a conviction I had formed the previous year, that running shoes are more a part of the problem, than the solution.

When I started a new blog about TMJ and chronic pain, I just had to add a section about my hobbies in order to lay down what I literally had run into during the last year in regard to running. Before I cited the "Painful Truth No. 1: The best Shoes are the Worst" out of Born to Run, I decided to follow up on it a bit. After all, the study cited by Dr. Marti was carried out in Bern, Switzerland - not too far from where I live. I could find nothing published in The Journal of Sports Medicine in 1989 as cited in the book, but I did find one published by Dr. Marti in that paper in June of 1988, titled "On the epidemiology of running injuries: The 1984 Bern Grand-Prix study". I was puzzled to read the following in the abstracts: "Injuries were not significantly related to race running speed, training surface, characteristics of running shoes, or relative weight."

This seems to suggest the opposite of what is cited in the book as the first painful truth. I have written Mr. McDougall and asked him to help me with what I am probably misunderstanding, but have received no answer in the course of several weeks. Does anybody know if he is citing a different study, or if it says something in the full text that contradicts the statement in abstract? Here is the link to it: http://ajs.sagepub.com/content/16/3/285.abstract
 
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Thanks Sid, you must have read the full text. Since you didn't let me in on the secret I have contacted the authors and requested it via researchgate.net. Can't wait to find out why they summarize the shoe issue so differently in the abstracts if they found something else in the study!
 
Is there such a thing as an unflawed study?

I like the road you took to get here, HL. Welcome!