Product Description

More than 24 million people run in the United States alone, but 65 percent will have to stop at least once this year because of injury. Still others will choose to run through the pain. But in this groundbreaking book, ultramarathoner Danny Dreyer teaches us the running technique he created to heal and prevent injuries and also to run faster, farther, and with much less effort at any age.

ChiRunning employs the deep power reserves in the core muscles of the trunk, an approach that grows out of such disciplines as yoga, Pilates, and t'ai chi. This excellent step-by-step program offers training principles and is easily learned.

Dramatically reduce your potential for injuryMake knee pain and shin splints a thing of the pastGreatly reduce post-run recovery timeCreate a safe and effective training program Make running any distance enjoyable whether you're a beginning runner or a seasoned competitor

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1360 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
Toby Tanserauthor of Train Hard,Win EasyThe most exciting and revolutionary book to hit the running community this decade.

Baron Baptisteauthor of Journey into PowerThis program will totally revolutionize the way you run.

About the Author
Danny Dreyer, an esteemed running coach and a nationally ranked ultra-marathon runner, has over thirty years of running experience and is a student of internationally renowned t'ai chi master George Xu. He has been published in Runner's World and Running Times, and is the author of his own monthly ChiRunning newsletter. He lives in the Bay Area and has taught the ChiRunning method to thousands of people with profound results.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction: Running Lessons from a T'ai Chi Master

Not long ago, I was running past a grade school. It was a warm, late-spring day, and the kids were out on recess. They were busy playing tag and chasing balls and just doing what kids do best -- running around. I stopped to take a swig of water from my bottle, and as I watched the flurry of little legs, I was reminded once again why I love to watch kids run. Every one of them had perfect running form: a nice lean, a great stride opening up behind them, heels high in the air, relaxed arm swing and shoulders. They had it all! One of my biggest desires as a coach is to help adults learn to run like they did as kids. It's such a natural movement when kids do it. It looks so effortless and joyful. Many books about running tell you to just go out and run like you did as a kid. There's just one problem with that suggestion: You don't have the same body today that you did back then. If you do, I'd like you to be my teacher.

So why don't adults run like kids, with that same ease and joyfulness? After running for thirty years and working with thousands of runners, I'd have to say that the two biggest factors are stress and tension. I can speak for myself, and maybe you can relate. Since I left the sixth grade, I have put my body through a wide range of physical and emotional stresses, such as tightening my shoulders when I'm worried, slouching all day at my desk, holding tension in my neck while driving -- the list is endless. Individually, these might not sound like a big deal, but when you add them all up over a lifetime, they have a major cumulative effect on how you move. I've also done a few radical things that have taken a bit more of a toll on my body, like skiing off cliffs and doing face plants while skateboarding. As Carolyn Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit, would say, "Your biography becomes your biology." With all of this abuse stored in my body, I'd be hard-pressed to run like I did as a kid. The good news is that for anyone with a little patience and perseverance, it is possible to get back to that state.

There are over 24 million runners in the United States alone. But get this. It is estimated that 65% of all runners incur at least one injury a year that interrupts their training. That means that 15.6 million people will get injured this year from running. No wonder people have a love/hate relationship with running. It's one of the most accessible and inexpensive ways to stay in shape, yet it poses a danger that is cautioned in articles, books, and doctors' offices everywhere. Most people treat injury as part of the sport and learn to accept that it will happen sooner or later: "I'll deal with it when it happens." It's the same line I get when I ask people in the San Francisco Bay area if they worry about earthquakes.

The conclusion I've come to after teaching countless runners is that running does not hurt your body. Let me repeat that -- and you can read my lips -- running does not hurt your body. It's the way you run that does the damage and causes pain.

When Adriane, 42, came to me, she was caught in a back-and-forth cycle of training hard to get into good condition, then getting injured and having to lay off for a couple of weeks, then starting all over again. She thought it was the right thing to constantly train fast and strength-train to improve her times in the marathon. But she was not making any forward progress because of the nagging injuries and her own internal pressure to keep increasing her weekly race-training schedule. With the ChiRunning technique, she learned how to relax while running and, more important, in the other areas of her life. She realized that she was not only a driven runner, she was a driven person. Without all the tension in her body, she stopped injuring herself while running, and her training took on a new level of consistency.

Jerry, a 59-year-old runner, was just about to give up running when he came to his first ChiRunning class. He had been a runner for forty years, and after having knee surgery, he had begun to feel the same old aches and pains creeping into his runs that had prompted the

surgery. He was afraid that if he continued running, he would ruin his knees and live in pain for the rest of his life. It has now been two years since his first class, and he is running regularly -- including an hour and a half on steep trails once a week -- and looking forward to many more years of pleasurable running. In fact, he wrote to me recently, thrilled that he had finished first in his age group in a local race, something he had never dreamed of even before his surgery.

Carmen, 35, was a beginning runner and insecure about her ability to do anything well physically. After taking a series of three ChiRunning classes, she happened to call as my wife, Katherine, and I were reviewing her class on video. Katherine remarked on how good Carmen looked in the film and asked her how she liked the class. "Oh, it simply changed my life" was the reply. "For the first time in my life, I feel like I can be good at a sport."

From beginners to competitors to the forty-plus crowd who are afraid of injuring themselves as they get older, ChiRunning is meeting the needs of runners with an approach that builds a healthy body instead of breaking it down from misuse or overuse.

ChiRunning Versus Power Running

The current paradigm of running form and injury prevention is founded in muscle strength. It is basically built around three principles: (1) If you want to run faster, you need to build stronger leg muscles. (2) If you want to run longer, you need to build stronger leg muscles. (3) If you want to avoid or recover from injuries, you need to build stronger leg muscles. Do you see a theme developing here? It's all dependent on muscles to get the job done, and the leg muscles are given the bulk of the responsibility to make it all happen. That's a lot of responsibility and, according to T'ai Chi principles, a very unbalanced way to move your body. The problem with strength training is that it doesn't get to the root of the most common cause of injury: poor running form. Most runners want to run either longer or faster at some point in their running career, but without good running form, added distance will only lengthen the time you are running improperly and increase your odds of getting hurt. If you try to add speed with improper running form, you are magnifying the poor biomechanical habits that could cause injury. So, the best place to build a good foundation is in getting your running motion smooth, relaxed, and efficient. Then you can add distance or speed without risking injury.

This book presents an alternative to what we call power running. ChiRunning is based on the centuries-old principle from T'ai Chi that states, Less is more. Getting back to that childhood way of running doesn't come from building bigger muscles, it comes from relaxing muscles, opening tight joints, and using gravity to do the work instead of pushing and forcing your body to move in ways that can do it harm. Most runners, especially those over 35, will tell you that running can keep you in good shape but it's hard on your body. I developed ChiRunning because I really didn't believe that pounding and injury should be a part of running. I just didn't buy it.

I've never considered myself a great runner. I liked to run as a kid, but I shied away from it in high school because, to tell you the truth, I was intimidated by the caliber of our track-team members, most of whom could run a hundred-yard dash in under 10 seconds and a quarter mile in under a minute. In an inner-city high school with 3,600 students, the coaches could basically pick from the cream of the crop, and I hardly considered myself even potential cream. So I joined the ski club and partied instead. In fact, I signed up to take gymnastics, because every Wednesday the gym classes had to run around a nearby lake, and I couldn't imagine making myself run for twelve minutes without stopping.

Don't get me wrong. I've always loved sports, and I love to learn new things with my body. Whenever I wanted to take on a new sport, I would apply another love of mine -- figuring out how things work. As far back as I can remember, I've always had questions running through my mind, like: "Why does a clock tick?" or "What kind of machine wraps a stick of butter?" As a kid, I loved taking things apart to see what made them do what they did, then I'd try to put them back together again. Although I had a lifetime average of about 75% on the reassembly, I always figured out how they worked.

This is what I did with skiing, rock climbing, and sailing. I broke each sport down into its elemental parts, which would then give me a physical understanding of how to put it all together into a unified movement. As I found myself improving, I would get more excited and consequentially focus even more. My learning was driven by my passion, so my hours spent practicing would fly by. I loved learning new body skills.

In my early twenties, when I took up running, I approached it in much the same way. I began running regularly in 1971, when I got drafted into the army. Running around the army base at an easy pace was very relaxing for my body and helped to settle my mind. This was the first time I had used a sport for more than physical fitness: I wasn't into being in the army, so I used running to escape the barracks and explore. After doing an eighteen-week stint with Uncle Sam, I was graciously given an honorable discharge, but not before discovering a new favorite pastime.

When I was a young adult, my curiosity about how things worked extended into those unseen forces out of which the physical world springs forth. I was no longer satisfied with only understanding the how, I wanted to know why they worked. I always came away with a sense that there was more going on than I was seeing. For lack of a better term, I call it the invisible world, and my curiosity about it is still the driving force behind my approach to life. It eventually led me t...

Customer Reviews

A Must Read and Apply for any Runner
I first discovered ChiRunning about two years ago, and have integrated
many of the techniques into my running game. I am revisiting this book
now, and gleaning new insights. It has been most helpful. Best of all,
I'm injury free!
Kudos to ChiRunning.

The 16 Minute Body Sculpting Kit: Attain Your Dream Body in Just 16 Minutes a Day!

It's not for the casual runner
The process is too involved and requires too much work to master. I run a couple of miles 3-4 days a week, so it is just not worth the effort. I give it 3 stars because the program could be useful to serious distance runners.

good ideas, but very poor presentation
this book starts out with a great premise -- that by learning to run more efficiently you can avoid injury and run longer and faster. that's undoubtedly true, and I am sure danny dreyer is good at teaching people how to do so in his courses, judging by his success and the testimonials he gets. but it is hard work putting the ideas in this book in to practice.

the main problems with this book are its poor organization and poor presentation of ideas. its organized more like a a set of notes than a manual, and despite its short length, contains a lot of long winded passages that don't impart a lot of information. too many of the sections involve instructions to get up and do something, rather than concise explanations of what he means.

really the book should have been broken into a series of lessons and exercises in chapter format, but halfway through the book he just dumps the entire technique on you, leaving it to you to figure out how to internalize all this stuff.

but beyond that, the techniques themselves seem poorly organized and explained. the author's grasp of tai chi theory is kind of sketchy, and his "chi principles" really ought to have focused on more universal concepts than the ones he chose. he doesn't give enough practical tips on developing body awareness, and there's almost no discussion of breathing, despite the fact that it should be central to the technique.

danny dreyer also doesn't seem to have a very firm grasp of the biomechanics of running. he tells you to use your hip flexors instead of your quads to run, but doesn't go into any detail about how that is possible. he says things like "swing your legs to the back" without realizing that different people will interpret that to mean different things. and there is very little discussion of what it should feel like on the inside when you do the techniques, or how exactly your core muscles contribute to running, which is the cornerstone of the system.

the problem really is that danny dreyer seems to be a visual learner and kind of a type a person, and doesn't understand that other people don't think the way he does. so he explains what it looks like to practice his technique, and gives you long to do lists for learning the form.

he also presents a one-size-fits-all explanation that doesn't take into account the fact that different people have very different bodies. for instance, his technique presupposes that you have an anteriorly-tilted pelvis, whereas I (and two or so billion other people) have a posteriorly tilted pelvis. so by engaging my abdominal muscles like he says to, this pulls my body too far forward. what people with this spinal condition need to do is actually engage their lower back muscles.

that said, I think there is a lot that can be learned from this book. if you, like I do, experience a lot of pain when running, this book can give you some pointers of directions to go in for improving technique. read some of it, try the things out, and see how it feels. but let your own body awareness be your guide. slavishly following these instructions could be counterproductive.

finally, I think some of the most important points aren't even in the technique sections, but the parts where he talks about twisting your torso and how kenyans and cheetahs run. you might be better off skipping buying this book just studying the way kenyans, cheetahs, and little kids run.

I think danny dreyer does have a good technique, and this really could have been an amazing running book if he had hired a co-author who had a better understanding of how to write and how other people learn. as it stands, its as a running manual that resembles japanese stereo instructions from the nineteen eighties. you will puzzle over it for hours trying to figure out how all this stuff is supposed to work.