Runners Who Put Their Best Foot Backward
For San Diego psychiatrist Kai MacDonald, a tough haul isn’t a question of two steps forward, one step back. For him, it’s one step back, and then another step back, and then tens of thousands more, until 26.2 miles have happily receded from view.
At 32, MacDonald is one of a small but ardent bunch of athletes who live not so much in the fast lane as in reverse gear. They run marathons and shorter races backward, leaving many of their forward-running brethren in their dust.
They say it’s great for the joints, heart, lungs, quadriceps and, if you can get past the slack-jawed stares and goofy remarks, the spirit.
In Italy, the world’s most accomplished backward runners compete in half a dozen races. A national “retro-running” association promotes the sport and competitors fly in for races from all over.
But in the ceaselessly forward-thinking United States, serious competition has never caught on. In New York City, a health club sponsors a one-mile backward run every April Fool’s Day.
In conventional races, a runner might have some fun and cross the finish line backward, just as others might don a top hat for their moment of triumph. But only a few hardy nonconformists feel compelled to go the distance putting one foot in back of the other.
“It’s kind of a European thing,” MacDonald said. “It doesn’t really fit in with our fast-paced, get-it-done-in-a-hurry culture.”
Then there’s the ridicule.
“That’s just part of the groove of running backwards,” MacDonald said. “But it’s also a very noncompetitive, Zen experience: Everyone faster than I am is behind me and everyone slower is in front.”
A frequent participant in San Diego’s Rock ‘n’ Roll marathon, MacDonald has run six or seven of the lengthy races backward, completing them at a pace as respectable as 4 hours and 20 minutes. Often training with a bike mirror clipped into his headband, he scans the terrain behind him for dogs, benches, potholes and other obstacles.
“It takes more perceptual focus,” he said. “It’s a little more stressful than forward running.”
But the payoff, he added, can be profound. MacDonald first threw himself into reverse running as a medical student in Minneapolis. Wracked with the stress of preparing for medical board exams, he had an epiphany when he first saw a runner gracefully striding backward in a local marathon.
“Part of what’s kept me in backwards running has been what it’s done for me,” he said. “You get to take off the whole take-yourself-seriously hat. It’s a really effective balm. I knew that running backwards would probably make it impossible for me to drive myself crazy.”
The sport’s boosters rhapsodize about its benefits.
“Backward running is like a good bottle of Bordeaux or Burgundy,” writes Christian Grolle, a pioneering French backward runner, on his Web site, www.backward-running-backward.com. “How to express with words the smell and flavor of these delicious French wines?”
Even so, Grolle offers a long list of advantages. Retro running “amplifies extraordinary sensations, unifies the body and mind, fights efficiently against stress and anxiety, enables you to stand back psychologically, and helps you to realize your human and sports potential.”
Experts say there are physiological advantages as well.
Forward running is only 80% as tough a workout as its backward cousin, said Barry Bates, retired director of the biomechanics lab at the University of Oregon.
Bates and other researchers have done a number of studies on running and walking backward. Their conclusions: Chugging along in reverse works the lungs more efficiently, burns more calories and allows the bones to absorb shock more effectively. On top of that, it aids in the recovery of patients with sprained ankles, pulled hamstrings, shin splints, groin injuries and recently repaired knee joints.
Bates builds a bit of backward into his own workouts, doing an about-face from time to time on a treadmill or elliptical trainer.
“To me it makes perfect sense,” he said. “The less you stress any one tissue in any one way, the less likely you are to get injured. Going backwards is a way of spreading forces around the body.”
For Scott McQueeney, the reason for running the Portland Marathon backward in October had nothing to do with body mechanics. To boost the spirits of his ailing 16-year-old daughter Shannon, he bet her that she didn’t have cancer. If she did, he told her, he’d run the marathon backward.
The bad news is that he had to make good on his pledge. A year after Shannon’s grim diagnosis, however, she is cancer-free.
“I’d done some crazy things running but never anything like a backwards marathon,” said McQueeney, a 47-year-old Web page designer. An old hand at the grueling 135-mile Badwater ultra-marathon from Death Valley to Mt. Whitney, McQueeney called his backward run “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
“When you stop, you have no stability,” he said. “It’s like someone has taken away the inner workings of your gyroscope. I went straight down.”
McQueeney thinks of backward running as “a fabulous tool,” but he doubts he’ll do another long-distance haul in reverse. His time -- including a few minutes lost to cramping and vomiting at mile 20 -- was a glacial 7 hours and 3 minutes.
On the other hand, “Backwards Bud” Badyna, holder of at least four backward world records, has no plans to quit backpedaling any time soon, though he took a break in the late 1990s.
An emergency room nurse on St. Simon’s Island in Georgia, he logs times that many middle-of-the-pack forward runners would envy, including his world backward marathon record of 3 hours and 53 minutes.
“Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to find my way into Ripley’s ‘Believe It or Not!’ or the ‘Guinness Book of Records,’ ” he said.
To that end, he has been known to run six days a week, loping backward beside salt marshes and down streets shaded by moss-draped oaks.
“My calves become real defined,” he said. “And my quads get so huge that my jeans don’t fit.”
Backwards Bud’s advice for becoming a great backward runner?
“Run backwards.”
