Best Foot Forward : Physiologist Plans to Analyze the Motion in the L.A. Marathon

What John Madden has done for pro football, frantically drawing plays and routes all over your TV screen on Sunday afternoons, Bob Prichard plans to do for the Los Angeles Marathon.

Presumably without the sound effects.

It’s a new notion, analyzing runners’ mechanics to this degree during a live telecast, but Prichard is sure it will catch on.

“I think this is going to revolutionize race broadcasting,” Prichard said. “It won’t be four hours of putting one foot in front of the other.”

Prichard will use slow-motion instant replay and the same type of telestrator that Madden uses. But he won’t be diagramming who’s in the lead or who’s bumping whom.

He’ll focus on a few of the elite runners, taking them one at a time and breaking down their stride mechanics to show who is running most efficiently and who seems to be tiring. He’ll do this by measuring the length and angle of their strides, the bounce in their steps, the way they pump their arms, their postures. He says he can even tell who is compensating for an injury that, possibly, is unknown to that runner himself.

Prichard, a physiologist, operates clinics in Northern California that specialize in helping athletes improve posture, flexibility and performance. His tool is the video camera.

For his research, Prichard spends hours studying the tapes and deciphering the information. But live television demands instant results.

Technically, it won’t be an easy thing to pull off. Phil Olsman, the producer of the L.A. Marathon for KCOP said, with a chuckle: “Well, it ain’t going to be easy . . . but it will work.This will be a challenge.”

Olsman said that his crew would try to isolate the leaders and get the slow-motion replays for Prichard after 5 miles, 10 miles, 15 miles and 20 miles. “After mile 5, you’ll have a group in the front and it won’t be too hard for us to find the people we want and allow Bob to get a fix on them,” Olsman said. “Then we can see how those people are doing at the next points.

“What we’re trying to do is present a unique perspective.”

Prichard is a kinetic analyst who became interested in the mechanics of sports when his research as a student at the University of California showed that chronic muscle injuries were related to flexibility. He began looking between the muscles at the connective tissues, at the intermuscular adhesions, and found that if those adhesions could be broken down, athletes would have more flexibility and better performance.

At his Somax clinic in San Rafael, he works at breaking down those adhesions.

To determine flexibility--which Prichard always sees as the bottom line, whether he’s talking about length of stride or the twisting of the upper body--he videotapes everything.

He doesn’t bother much with sports events hurrying past him in real time. But he watches sports on television by the hour, recording everything on his video machines. If a sprinter comes to him for advice, he has a tape library to show Carl Lewis or Ben Johnson. If a tennis player comes to him, he has a tape library to show Boris Becker or Martina Navratilova.

He has to stop the action so that he can analyze, in minute detail, the motions and postures that the great athletes seem to have naturally.

In runners, he looks mostly at the length of stride, the amount of bounce and the body alignments.

He has a long list of checkpoints he’ll be monitoring when he does his commentary on the L.A. Marathon. Things that, as he puts it, “In real time, are difficult to see.”

Crossing over with a foot and putting it down two or three inches to the inside instead of straight ahead can cause injuries and certainly causes the runner to run extra distance. Inches on every step add up to miles during a marathon.

It’s the same with too much bounce. Besides the extra pounding on knees and ankles, the energy expended in fighting gravity more than it has to be fought can translate to running uphill an extra mile or climbing a 60-story building.

Prichard had set up his video equipment in the back room of the Triathlete magazine offices in Los Angeles and was explaining his theories and methods to a couple of reporters when some of the top triathletes dropped by.

They knew, of course, that a more efficient runner will make better time than a hack flailing away and wasting a lot of motion, but they really perked up when Prichard starting equating inches to miles and bounce to climbing mountains.

Scott Molina found it hard to believe that by breaking down adhesions between muscles to give an athlete greater flexibility, Prichard could help a runner widen his stride and eat up those marathon distances much faster with the same energy.

Prichard actually stopped his tape to make his point. Molina argued that to propel himself farther on that step, a runner would have to use more energy. Prichard insisted that a relaxed runner, with greater flexibility, would not have to push himself any harder to let his leg reach to its natural extension.

But Prichard always preaches against over-striding--reaching out with the lower leg past the natural stride to try to get greater distance with each step. “When you overstride you not only cause injuries, but you actually slow yourself down,” Prichard said. “If your foot lands out in front of you, it acts as a brake.”

And he has videotape to prove it.

During a race, he’ll be able to prove some of his points by showing front runners compared to those dragging behind.

He expects to find those in the front showing a much longer stride than those in the back. He’s looking forward to showing which runners use the proper techniques on the hill in Chinatown.

But he does not expect to be able to show the TV audience a picture of perfection.

“There are no really efficient distance runners,” Prichard said. “There are some who are efficient, but with lots of room for improvement. That’s why I see a sub-two hour marathon in the next four or five years. If some of those runners could overcome the mistakes that they are making, they could be much faster.”