Kelly Starrett - Ready to Run: Unlocking Your Potential to Run Naturally

This book is for Juliet. Thank you for the effortless way you continually save my life. Heres to the death of the notion that evolution, innovation, and creativity happen as solo events. A lion is nothing without a cheetah.

First published in 2014 by Victory Belt Publishing Inc.

Copyright 2014 Kelly Starrett and T.J. Murphy
All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-628600-09-4 (sc)
978-1-628600-72-8 (ebook)

The information included in this book is for educational purposes only. It is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice. The reader should always consult his or her healthcare provider to determine the appropriateness of the information for his or her own situation or with any questions regarding a medical condition or treatment plan. Reading the information in this book does not create a physician-patient relationship.

Victory Belt is a registered trademark of Victory Belt Publishing Inc.

Cover Design: Tom Wiscombe. TomWiscombe.com

Photo Credits
Caragh Camera: 15, 21, 30, 38, 57, 64, 88, 121, 122, 166, 265
Glen Cordoza: 63, 65
Serge Dubovsky: 39, 96, 99, 100, 108, 148, 179, 183, 186, 203, 255, 261
Darren Miller: 2, 6, 27, 41, 113, 271, 275-276. Darrenmillerphoto.com
John Segesta: 18-19, 31, 40, 50, 52, 54, 54, 55, 64, 66, 68-69, 80, 82, 86, 92-95, 105-107, 114-118, 124-142, 149-165, 172-178, 190-193, 200-202, 205-254, 260, 264, 270. Johnsegesta.com
Courtesy of Rock and Roll Marathon: 110
Courtesy of CrossFit, Inc: 48, 143, 167, 259. CrossFit.com
Courtesy of MobilityWOD: 15, 21, 30, 38, 39, 57, 88, 96, 99, 108, 121, 122, 148, 166, 179-189, 203, 255, 261, 265. MobilityWOD.com

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PREFACE

FREEING THE RUNNER WITHIN: YOUR CRUCIAL FIRST STEP

BY T.J. MURPHY

NFL football players, elite military athletes, fighter pilots, San Francisco Ballet dancers, Tour de France cyclists, world-class CrossFitters and powerlifters, and runners of all varietiesthis is the sort of range of athletes who have benefited from Dr. Kelly Starretts particular genius when it comes to movement and mechanics.

Kellys own background is equally eclectic. He was a member of the USA Canoe and Kayak Team and competed in two world championships with the Mens Whitewater Rafting Team. His interests are wide and far-ranging, from surfing to martial arts to skateboarding to Olympic lifting to so-you-think-you-can-dancing.

In a way, Kellys journey to becoming an internationally renowned expert in movement began at the end of his kayaking career. While putting in yet another hour of hard trainingon top of the thousands he had already loggedhis neck and shoulder went into a human version of a computer crashing. He couldnt turn his head. His professional whitewater career was done.

Thats when his obsession with movement and mechanics began. Spend some time with Kelly, and you become distinctly aware that he sees and processes everything through a 300x lens. As his wife, Juliet Starrett, once told me, Kelly can sense illness and injury in others before any symptoms have manifested. It was natural that he gravitated toward becoming a doctor of physical therapy, and later becoming an innovative thinker in performance-related solutions at the internationally regarded Stone Clinic in San Francisco.

One day, while practicing a series of combat moves with a knife that he saw in a video on the Internet, Kelly stumbled upon CrossFit, the then-fledgling fitness program based on constantly varying functional movements performed at high intensity. Soon enough, he and Juliet opened up one of the first CrossFit affiliates in the world, San Francisco CrossFit. His physical therapy insight and knowledge, let loose within the lab-like environment that is a CrossFit gym, enabled him to observe and learn from the many thousands of workouts through which he coached his gyms members. It spawned an electrically charged new line of thinking about how to solve the various problems that crop up in regard to athletic performance.

This book is about running. Distance running, yes, but also the problems that all athletes who run facefrom those just beginning in fitness to the professional NFL cornerback who runs as a player and also in training. Its for CrossFit athletesmany of whom make it clear that they hate runningand for experienced ultramarathoners who are sick of being mired in injuries.

The ideas and framework that Kelly sets forth in this book are not just about preventing and dealing with injuries. A tremendous bonus to solving injury-related problems with solutions based on mechanics, position, and mobility is that it also frees up extra performance that you may not have known you had. The same tissue restrictions that are causing your knee pain may also be robbing you of some hidden flow of power output. By improving the positions you adopt and the health of the tissues involved and installing normal range of motion in your joints, you may find additional energy to help you run faster and longer.

In my case, opening my mind to Kellys ideas was not just about solving a nagging injury. It was about solving all of my nagging injuriesincluding one that, as I can see looking back, was similar to what Kelly experienced on his last day as a professional kayaker.

It was November 2011, and I was staying in a Midtown hotel in New York City. I was five weeks away from running a half-marathon in Las Vegas. It was a Saturday, and my training plan called for a tempo run of 4.5 miles at a pace where I would average 170 to 175 heartbeats per minute.

As I prepared to knock out the run on a treadmill in the hotel gym, I didnt have a clue how much this single workout would impact the direction of my life as an athlete and a runner.

My goal for the half-marathon was not time-specific. Rather, it was to log an uninterrupted year of consistent training, a feat that had eluded my grasp for more than a decade. It was a clear-cut, blue-collar task, like polishing off a year of work as a truck drivernothing fancy about it. Yet it was as if I was driving the truck on a road riven into shards of rock. When I started training in 2011, I dared to look back at the wreckage of the preceding years of struggling to maintain my identity as an athlete. On rare occasions I was able to hold it together long enough to earn a marathon or Ironman finishers T-shirt, but I would pay dearly after such efforts, moving through life as if I had jumped through the windshield of my truck and effectively run over myself.

In my 40s, my injuries ran wild. I was like a scene from The Evil Dead. Stabbing chronic knee pains and a trick back upended whatever running goal I was limping my way toward. These stoppages and their inherent psychological free falls came with the added drag of getting fat. When I was at my fastest as a runner, I weighed 160 to 165 pounds. After one of my injury forays, my weight floated up toward 210. Which made my next attempt at defying the pattern of chronic injury all the harder.