Episode 451: Running Shoes Will Predict Injury | Royi Metser
Royi Metser joined me to share some discuss how we collect data through wearables like watches, foot pods, and heart rate monitors. We dive into the future of how footwear can add to these data points, in an effort to better optimize mechanical loading.
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Episode Transcript:
Royi, thanks for coming in to chat with me today. How's it going? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Zach. Yeah. No, I'm looking forward to chatting with you. I think it's an interesting topic we have and and and is timely for my podcast too, because this year I've been doing a lot more kinds of shoe based topics and shoe reviews specifically. So, uh, kind of getting into the the back end of some of the stuff or in your case, maybe the future of footwear and wearables in general will make for a fun conversation for the for the listeners who are fellow shoe nerds and running fanatics and want all the data they can get their hands on. I'll definitely fall into that bucket. So I'm excited to get into it with you. Yeah, absolutely. So maybe before we dive into that, we just share with the listeners a little bit about yourself, kind of what got you interested in running and then specifically kind of diving in kind of the business side of running or or heading that direction anyhow. Absolutely. Yeah. So my name is Royi. I'm the founder and CEO of Avelo Running, and I've been at this, uh, building this company for about two and a half years. I actually found running a little bit later in my life. I was 31 years old. It was around 2021. And you know, before that point, I always loved to run. Um, but that was a point in my life where for the first time in my adult life, I found myself unhealthy and overweight and I got kicked in the ass pretty hard by, uh, blood tests that I did where I got some results that, um, really woke me up. You know, it was about a year and a half into the Covid pandemic and things had been locked down. And really, I had stopped exercising for the first time in my life for an extended period. And that meant I, you know, put on a bunch of weight and again, had high cholesterol and a biological age that was much older than my real age. And getting those results back was the wake up call that I needed and the catalyst that I needed to make a change in my life. And I went from 0 to 100 pretty quick. So a couple days after getting that test result, I decided to sign up for a marathon and I had never run a marathon before. I had raced a couple half marathons in the past. Um, and I'm so glad I did, because that was the motivation that I needed to get off my butt and start exercising again. And that week I started running. And pretty quickly I was feeling better. Um, I trained for six months. I even hired a coach, um, Matt Daniels, a professional trail runner and also a great, great coach who I know, uh, you know, and he helped me prepare for that race. And I crossed the finish line about six months later in the fall of 2021. And I fell in love with running through that journey of training for that first marathon. And I've run another marathon since then. It was through that, that journey of becoming, I guess you could call a runner. And, um, you know, I know a lot of us have experienced this just getting basically addicted to the sport and to the process of trying to improve, where I started to think about this business idea, really, because I was consuming all of the content and using all of the products that were available to me. Um, shoes, of course, technology, and was starting to get better and just started asking questions that I didn't feel like I had good answers to, and I felt like there was an opportunity, given the advancements in technology that had happened over the last couple of decades, as well as just where the market was, and how more and more people just want more, more data about their body, and they want to use information about their body and about their performance and their health to make smarter decisions in those in those areas of their life. And so all of that kind of came together. Um, to get me to decide to actually launch a business in this space. And it was really born out of my personal passion and desire to improve and to create a product that could help others do that too. Mhm mhm. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting because what we were chatting about the other day was just this sort of move within the health and fitness arena as a whole I would say. But even running, if we want to get more specific or just, we've got all these different wearables and these different tests that you can do to really try to get a step further than we would have in the past to optimize. So we were playing maybe a little less trial and error with diet, a little less trial and error with, um, did I, you know, is my sleep in the right spot or not, or is my training going in the right direction? Even something as simple as, okay, I've got this GPS file from my workout. I can upload it onto a platform like Training Peaks or wherever, and kind of unpack everything and see the nuance of that session and then compare it to prior things, and just use all these data points to really get a little bit deeper into the assessment side of whether that stress recovery timeline is matching up well for adaptations and developments. And really, what I think has been sort of left along the wayside to some degree is what are we doing with footwear specifically in terms of giving us information that could easily be collected by that piece of product? And it's almost like shoes now, obviously they have had a big surgeon's popularity for innovation with all the super foams and plates and things like that. But in terms of the information it's giving us, it really doesn't give us anything objective the way that we would get. So it's almost like they're still in the, the, the watch version of just like start stop lap versus the watch that gives us heart rate, pulse oximeter, paces at various intensities and all sorts of different things like that. So it's like. Given the direction things are going, it seems like footwear would be something that would eventually start adding those pieces of the puzzle of like, okay, what can we learn about the way my left foot is striking the ground versus my right foot? Or, you know, things like, you know, ground, ground contact time and impact forces and things like that that are measurable. I mean, you can go into a lab and measure these things. So how do we take the lab and bring it out into the field? So a person can kind of assess these things more rigorously in their day to day training and things like that. And it sounds like that's kind of what you're trying to target with Othello and that product line 100%, If you nailed it. So, you know, a watch used to be a watch that told you the time, uh, a phone used to be something that you just used to make calls, right? Our cars didn't have all of these sensors in them to tell us when the tire pressure was low or when someone was in our blind spot. Right. And so, of course, over time, and as technology has improved, all of these products have become smart. And really, the goal is to create smart products that make our lives better. Right. Um, it's not making them smart for the sake of it. And, you know, in the wearables category, obviously, we've seen tremendous innovation on the wrist worn wearables, right. So you alluded to all the amazing information we're getting from our smartwatches or wrist worn, um, straps or even rings to better understand our physiology. And it's amazing. We now can better understand how we're sleeping each night, the effect of our lifestyle and nutrition and other factors on our sleep, how physiologically stressed and recovered we are on any given day. And that's incredible insight. I believe, and this is one of the things that I identified when I was thinking about this. There's still a gap in understanding human movement and the forces that are acting on our body during movement, in other words, biomechanics. This is something that's been studied for decades, but it's been constricted to the lab. Really. I mean, you mentioned you can go into a biomechanics lab and have a gait analysis done, but how do we bring that incredible insight into the field and make it available on every single step? The same way that we've made data that was previously restricted to going into a lab and, you know, sleeping overnight to understand how you're sleeping or, you know, technology that could measure your heart rate, that required you to basically see a physician or get use medical equipment, you know, how do we make that accessible to every person and on every step? And of course, there is some technology that's been developed and some really good technology around, um, you know, things that you could attach to your shoes. So whether that's to your laces or even insoles that you could place inside of your shoes. We took a different approach, and it was very intentional. And of course, we thought about the different ways we could attack this problem. And, um, you know, the analogy that I like to use to explain why we decided to actually go through the trouble of making a shoe is, um, you know, most of us who run where we're not going through the trouble of wearing a heart rate chest strap. I don't know if. Do you wear a chest strap or are you using the watch to get heart rate? I'll do both. If I really want to make sure I optimize accuracy, I'll put the chest strap on. But if I'm just out for a typical run, I'll usually just rely on the wrist based one or or just not pay attention to heart rate at all, depending on what the goal is. Makes sense. So I mean, for the vast majority of runners, you know, we're not going through the trouble of fidgeting with an additional accessory or gadget and, you know, putting it on our chest before every run and taking it off and remembering to charge it. And it's kind of uncomfortable and it gets sweaty and smelly, right? Like, it's just much easier to just stick the watch on because we were already wearing a watch, you know, for, for a long time we've been wearing watches. Now all of a sudden they're smart. Okay, I don't really have to change my behavior very much to get some additional insight and information that I can use to make better decisions. So a similar concept here, right? So how do we take this technology, which is available and embed it seamlessly in a product that we're already using. Right. Your shoes are one of the few pieces of equipment that you absolutely need to go running. So how do we embed this technology in a way that makes it frictionless, where all you have to do is just lace up your shoe and start running, just like you did before when your shoes were not smart. And we felt that that was one of the keys to make this a mass market product that could be available to every runner. Now there's trade offs, right? Of course, uh, runners are very particular about their shoes. Um, it's hard to find a bad shoe these days. I think the shoe technology, which you talk about a lot, has advanced in a pretty amazing way in the last decade or so. And the running shoe brands are doing such an amazing job of just innovating on materials. Um, and again, it's hard to find a bad running shoe today from any brand really. So it's a very competitive market. You're asking people potentially to try a shoe from a brand that they don't yet know and switch from a shoe, maybe that they trust or that that they know. And, you know, each of our feet is different, right? We have different preferences. What we find comfortable is different. The shape of our feet is different. Um, you've got heel to toe drop out. You've got the amount of stack height that you want. Right. So like there's a lot of these factors which, um, you know, there's a trade off there which maybe for some runners there's a little bit more of a barrier for them to try the product. But we believe that if we can pull it off, then this is something that is incredibly easy to use. And over time, of course, we'll have enough models to satisfy every type of runner. And when they use it, they're going to use it forever because it's just so easy. Whereas there's some friction when you are forcing someone to have another gadget or accessory that they have to remember to put on and move between their shoes, charge when it's out of battery, right? Like there's all these little things that add up to make it very challenging to use some of these other products over a long period of time. And so that was, again, a very intentional decision that we made. And the idea is just to quantify human movement, to quantify the forces that are acting on our body, and then to to provide that insight to runners on every single step to help them make better decisions about their training. Interesting. Yeah, that was one of the questions I was going to ask you about with the shoe design model versus trying to apply this technology towards a pair of shoes someone's already wearing. Is that kind of like how wide of a net can you cast when you have a shoe? Is it going to be something where either the technology is such that this is less important than I think it maybe is just intuitively, or is it something where, like down the road, they'll go to get a shoe from, from you and it's like, all right, I can get sort of like a more like max cushion, higher offset option, or I can get a lower profile, lower offset option and things in between so people can try to match your shoe towards the one they're typically wearing out in their normal training. Yeah. So we started by, first of all, assembling a team of incredible footwear industry executives, designers and veterans that have been in the industry for decades. Collectively on our team, we've got over 150 years of experience making footwear for brands like Nike, Adidas and others. And so the reason that was so important is because we know that for us to have any chance, the shoe has to be exceptional. Like we know that a serious runner is not going to compromise and run an okay shoe just to get some more data or information or insight. And so my co-founder spent 30 years at Nike. His name is Peter. We've assembled a team of footwear designers that he worked with at Nike and in other stops in his career. Um, and what we set out to do was to design a highly versatile super trainer as our first model. You know, we looked at the running shoe market and all of us are runners too. And, you know, some of my favorite shoes over the last few years are, you know, models like the Saucony Endorphin Speed, the New Balance Rebel, uh, the Brooks Hyperion Max. Right. Like these kinds of, uh, New Balance super comp trainers. Right. Like these kind of do it all, uh, trainers that, um, are kind of the child of if a super shoe, a racing shoe and a daily trainer had a baby. Right. Like, that's come out the other end. Uh, so they're using the premium materials and a lot of leveraging a lot of the innovation that's been done in footwear and has made its way to the super shoes, right? With the advent of really the vapor kick this all off. Um, but then putting it in a package that's more suitable to a wider variety of training. Right? So it's not just for race, it's not just for workouts. It's something you can run in every day. And so typically what that means is the foam is pretty similar to these super shoes. Right. It's using some of these highly, uh, responsive high energy return and lightweight foams. Uh, PBA, tp foam. Um, so it's still very light and very responsive. Typically there is a plate, um, sometimes a carbon fiber plate. Um, but in our shoes we put a paper plate in there. So it's essentially a plastic plate. So it's a little more flexible than carbon fiber. It's not as rigid. Um, which makes it a little better suited for everyday training. You're a little bit more in control of the shoe. Um, versus a carbon fiber plate. Um, and then keeping it really light. Right. Horseshoe is right around eight ounces in a men's nine. Um, and just creating a shoe that we felt like was as versatile as possible for as many runners as possible. Um, so that it could be used on easy runs. It could be used for workouts. It could be used for long runs, and it could handle all of those things pretty damn well. Again, in that mold of the super trainer, right. Like Asics, Super Blast is another one that, um, you know, has done a great job. The Adidas, um, Evo XL. Right. So, like, these shoes are gaining more and more traction. And so we set out to design a shoe and build a shoe that was in that mold. Um, now, of course, we can't satisfy everyone with one model, but we feel like we've done a pretty damn good job with our first, because we've gotten great reviews from the testers that are using it. In the future. Our vision is to create a portfolio of shoes where you. If you want, you can get your entire shoe rotation from us. Obviously we want to satisfy more runners with different preferences, right? So we started, for example, with an eight millimeter drop. That's pretty common. That's I would say one of the most popular, uh, drops that runners love. But it's not going to satisfy everyone. There's people who want a lower job. Maybe some people who even want higher drops. So we'll have different variants of each shoe so that if someone prefers a different drop, they can get it from us, different stack heights, but then also different types of shoes. Right. So, um, the super trainer is kind of the shoe in the middle of your rotation, right? It can kind of extend to easy and, and long run and workout. Um, but it can handle all of those things. Well, we'll go the other direction. Right. So make an easy day. More of an easy day. Shoe not plated, more cushioned. Right. Kind of maybe more of a max cushion and then go the other, other direction in the opposite direction of making a racing shoe. And eventually the idea is, hey, Zach, if you want a shoe from a villa, you can get whatever shoe in your rotation you want, potentially your entire rotation from us. And because we know exactly how you move, you know we can recommend the right shoe in our portfolio for you, for your unique biomechanics and also use your data to inform, okay, what is future design for a velo look like? How do we design shoes that meet the unique needs of the runners who are running in our product? Right. We can see better than any of our other shoe companies what the effect of these different shoes are, the different characteristics, and also just how people are moving and designing shoes with that in mind. So that's the vision. It's not impossible to think that one day the technology could move to other products, right? We could put it in an insole. We could partner with other footwear brands. That's not something we're thinking about in the near term, but it's certainly a possibility. But we felt like the best way to start creating the whole thing. Mhm. Yeah I guess show the industry the value and then they'll get interested in it. And you know I guess like at that point the big brands, maybe they don't want to try to reinvent the wheel so to speak. They want to kind of outsource some of that stuff. So it can almost be almost like how Vibram works to some degree, where it's like they've got their brand outline. But yeah, yeah, but then yeah, they're working with all the major brands essentially, that want to have that kind of top of the market outsole, uh, reputation and durability and traction and whatnot. So yeah, I could see that being something where it's like the core metric gathering pieces of the shoe can be applied into any brand, essentially. And then, you know, they want to choose their models to put it in. Um, I do want to kind of rewind a little bit because like you were I think you alluded to this earlier and I find it really interesting too, as this isn't the first attempt the running industry has made at something like this. Uh, you mentioned Nike. They tried to kind of do something like this at one point in time. I know, you know, I was with ultra footwear for 11 years, and at one point, somewhere in the middle of that timeline, I can't remember the exact date they launched a shoe called the, um, the Turin IQ. Yeah. Which was essentially the same idea of building the force plate measurement stuff into the shoe, and then you'd have an app and it would measure it and give you feedback on all these different characteristics of your running. Um, none of that stuff really took off. My thought was kind of like one, maybe it was a little bit ahead of its time in terms of like back then, I think wearables and, you know, bio optimization was kind of just getting started. So it might have just been like one too many things on top of like a, a, a like a budding industry, uh, was sort of there. And it's also like you've got these shoe brands, even Nike, which is obviously the biggest, they're kind of doing all sorts of stuff. So it's like they have these like side projects or these side quests and it's like, how do you really market that appropriately when you're also trying to market everything else on your line, when that's not going to be the, like the primary mover for sales and things like that. So it seems like it's almost something that needs to be spearheaded exclusively so that whoever's doing it is focusing just on that and really making that their their marketing objective and their research objective and putting all their attention into this versus it being kind of a distraction from their typical flow. Yet again. Hit. Hit the nail on the head so that every prior attempt has been by an established incumbent footwear brand. Doing this as an innovation project, right? And when it's an innovation project, it's kind of off to the side. It's not the company's core priority. It's not their core revenue generator. If it fails. No big deal. Like obviously they want it to succeed, but life goes on. The business survives. Um, and it's not their sole focus. They haven't organized their team entirely around making this successful. They're not sweating the details just because they don't have to. Like a startup whose life depends on making this amazing and successful like a startup would, they're not moving as fast as a startup would. And so, um, you know, the Nike example is a great one. I think that they were really onto something. You know, Nike could have been a great wearables company. They built Nike Plus. And actually my co-founder Peter was the lead executive at Nike building Nike Plus in the early 2000. And they partnered with Apple. You mentioned the timing was very different and that certainly had something to do with it. We didn't even have an iPhone at that time. So what they did is they partnered with Apple, and they developed a little adapter that you could attach to an iPod and sync over Bluetooth, um, and get some data. And at the time, the data was great, but it was in today's terms, like you were understanding your pace and your distance and the steps that you were taking. Like that. That was the innovation. And it was great for its time today. Obviously, you know, the market has changed where we're used to monitoring our body in a way that we just weren't 20 years ago. The technology has advanced so we can monitor many more and interesting things. Battery life has improved, processing power has improved. So it's just both from a consumer adoption and demand point of view and also just the technology, the available technology that's there. Um, it's changed dramatically. And unfortunately at Nike, you know, ultimately it was seen as a way to sell more shirts and shoes, not as a standalone product and a business that could deliver standalone value to the people who were using it. And a lot of people that I've talked to think like, hey, Nike could have been like, whoop! For example, you know, if they really wanted to, right? They had a FuelBand and it was pretty cool. But like, they focused on kids and, um, you know, they didn't really focus on elite performers. And so it's just. These. These companies are incredible. The brands are incredible. I would argue Nike is the best brand of all time or, you know, potentially still in the world, but they're good at certain things and it's very challenging, especially for these big companies. You can think of them as like a big cruise ship, like for a cruise ship to move and change direction just a little bit, like it's so much effort, it's so hard, it's so slow. And so that's basically been every prior attempt. It's been an organization like that that's structured that way. No one's been maybe crazy enough like we are, to say, hey, no, we're going to as a startup, we're going to build the whole thing. And so that's one thing that makes us very unique. I think the timing is much different. I think the market is much more ready for it. The technology is much better. Um, and so yeah, we're attacking it a little bit differently. We're organized differently. And so that gives us conviction that we're going to finally crack this code, because I think the fact that it's been tried so many times, um, or at least a few times, shows that there is promise. Like, these people are smart. They see the opportunity, they see the value of the data. It's just they haven't, the execution hasn't been there. Um, yeah. No. One of the things that kind of signals to me that the market's more ready for something like this now than it was in the past was you like, you kind of described like pretty much everyone is running with their phones now. Like it's rare that you see someone running without a phone and. You. So you have this sort of scenario where now you can kind of rely on that being the case versus like making a product and trying to guess what they're going to bring with them and build in some sort of connectivity to that. And the sign here I always find is like that I find interesting anyway, do you remember those at the Apple iPod shuffles, those little like. Yeah of course. Yeah. Awesome product for its time. Like so small, so easy that you can clip it anywhere. Um, it seems archaic that there were cords to headphones still, but you know that it was what it was back then, and it was like that was such a cool product at the time because it's like, okay, cool. I can run with music and I don't have to really feel like laboring down with a heavier object or something like that, or something I'm fumbling around with. And Apple pulled that off the market despite it being a successful I remember a lot of runners, myself included, were complaining when they pulled that off the market and they just came to the conclusion like, look, people are running with their phones now, why would we sell a product that, uh, is doing something the phone already does if they're already going to have the phone? And now we solve the Bluetooth problem where you're going to connect to a wireless speaker and, and. Yeah. And they just kind of, you know, as Apple has done historically as they predict, the trends that are coming up and they drive the they drive the, that sort of stuff a lot of times too. So, you know, yeah, we're in this space now where like if you have some sort of technology that is dependent upon having access to a phone or something like that, a supercomputer, essentially nowadays it's like you can basically count on people having that. So, um, yeah, yeah, 100%. And you're wearing a watch too. So you can, you can get music off your watch now, like you don't even have to run with your phone anymore. And we're not making it a requirement around your phone. There might be certain features that require a phone on the run, but like, you can go and run in a bellows without your phone. All the data will be recorded. It'll store locally on your memory, on the device, and then when you get back home, like you just sync to your phone. So it's it's. Um, it's not required anymore even to run with your phone. Mhm. Yeah, that's a good point. And I actually wonder about that too now with like you said these watches are now holding music. You're also able to take and make phone calls and text messages with your watch and depending on your service I guess it depends on whether you have to have the phone there or not. But we may be moving away from carrying your phone with you. Although I guess with all the picture taking and video taking, maybe that's a bridge too far, but if you take that out of the equation, then it's like, yeah, you can basically these watches now are also small computers basically on our wrist. So yeah. Um, yeah. You can load workouts there. You can use it to guide you as you're working out. Right. Um, so yeah, they've become pretty amazing in their own right. Mhm. Yeah. Is there going to be any sort of guy like that? Because I kind of see this as two different things. One is all right you're getting you're gathering this information in live. So there's a potential there for immediate feedback. If you're if it notices something shifting like okay fatigue is setting in. That's changing like vertical oscillation or ground contact time. Or maybe you're favoring one leg more than the other. Um, some, you know, interesting stuff like that that might be conducive to tipping someone off about where their kind of fatigue level is at. And you know, how far into, like, the stress side of the stimulus. They want to keep pushing and then they're sort of the like, all right, I'm just going to go and do this, run and gather this information and then load it up onto the computer or the phone and check it out afterwards and just dive into kind of it as an assessment, the way that you would do, kind of like a GPS file after a run, is the idea there that you're going to have access to, kind of like both of those options when you're out there running or analyzing things after a run? Exactly. Yeah. So post run for sure. Right. So if you run with your phone or without you go for your run. All the data is recorded. You come back, you sync, you see all your insights. And of course in between runs you can view all your insights in the app. And then real time, real time feedback is one of the most exciting areas, honestly, for us. And that's an area where we're going to have just more insight on what's happening at. I would argue the most crucial point while you're running, which is what's happening, you know, where your body is meeting the ground and how that's changing over time, especially on efforts that might be longer or might be harder. Um, there's so much we can understand around your performance, around your efficiency, and around your fatigue in real time to help you make better decisions while you're running, and also just keep you running in a way that's most efficient. And, um, to make sure that your form is not breaking down, uh, while you're running and while you're fatiguing, some of which is, of course, perfectly natural. There's also opportunities to help people work on their running mechanics. Right? So guide them through audio coaching while they're running to help them improve. If we identify an opportunity to improve their mechanics. And here it's a little bit. We want to be careful because we have some of the best researchers and scientists on our team in this area around biomechanics and gait and injury and performance. And the research on a running form is kind of all over the place. I think what we know, there's so much we don't know, what we do know at this point is there's not one correct way for Zach and Royi and everyone to run, right. There's not one way we should all be striving to run. Each of us is unique. We move in different ways. We have different bodies, right? Different heights, different weights, just different joint angles, um, different histories, training histories, uh, injury history. Right. And so all of that is going to lead to unique movement patterns. And there's not necessarily, um, one. Correct. And uh, all other ways are a bad way to move. So what we want to help runners understand first and foremost is how they move. Like what is your we call it your running signature because your running form is much like a signature. It's unique to you. There's only one of them ideally. Right. Um, and what does that mean for your mechanical efficiency and for your, um, potentially your risk of injury. Right. So can we help a runner understand what type of runner they are? Are they more of an aerial runner or a grounded runner? Or when they're picking up the pace, do they rely more on cadence or more on stride length? What is their foot strike pattern? You know, if you're a four foot striker, it's not necessarily better than being a heel striker. It's just different. You're going to be loading different structures in your body than if you are a heel striker. You should know that. Um, how much are you pronating again? Another topic that we can do some myth busting there because there's been a ton of misinformation, quite frankly, about this concept of pronation and over pronation, which, by the way, we don't even really know how to define over pronation. And we know that pronation is something that's perfectly natural. It's a mechanism that our body uses to absorb shock and then to return it to the next stride. And this isn't something that we need to be scared of, right? But we can help you understand how much you pronounce and and the implications of that on what injuries you might be at a greater risk for and, and the proactive actions you can take to do based on your unique running signature, put you in the best position to succeed and avoid injury. Another one is symmetry. You mentioned that, right? So these are all things that require education. So we just want people to have more information about their body that's powerful. And then use that information to make better decisions, not just about their running, but also what are the other things they could be doing to supplement their running that are tailored to their unique running signature, that can make them more successful? Um, and so that's a long way of saying, yes, we plan on providing both post run, but also real time, uh, coaching and insight. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. The interesting thing about this stuff too, I find and I think I've, I see this sometimes with like wearable watches and stuff like that where there's so much information that can be gathered, you can almost get a little bit of paralysis because it's like, okay, I have all this information, what do I do with it? Or I'm new. Yeah. I'm new. I don't know what to do with it. I know there's a bunch of info coming in, but it's just like a foreign language passing your eyes. You don't really. You can't make any sense of it. So then it's like, well, how does the product educate in a way that is both easy for the user to understand at the ground level? Uh, or kind of does that hard part for them. So yeah. Like, yeah. So like when it's like these interesting features, if they're coaching you and saying, we gather this information, this is what it means to you, I think to the user that's way more palatable, way more approachable. There's way less friction for them to actually use it when it's something like, hey, your movement pattern has been doing this. Maybe focus on NE drive, or maybe focus on cadence, or maybe, you know, giving you an actual, yeah, actionable stuff that people can wrap their head around and actually put into practice on their next 100%. Yeah. And that comes down to just sweating the details and being obsessed with going a step further because it's hard to turn this stuff into actionable advice. Um, and so we're obsessed with taking, of course, providing the insight, but then boiling it down to here's the top one, maybe 2 or 3 things that you should focus on, right? And some of it might be running related. So a really simple one. And we're getting this from our watches today. So um, but it's still something that a lot of runners I think have an opportunity to improve. Is your cadence right? So we know actually in the research that's one of the things that's been shown when they take runners and they increase their cadence, you know, 5 or 10% higher than their naturally preferred cadence. We see a reduction in impact. We see a reduction sometimes in, in injury incidents, um, we see an improvement in the running economy. And this is something that for some reason runners are still not being guided to improve their cadence if their cadence is below a certain threshold. And there's been this kind of misconception about cadence as well, that there's this magical number of 180 steps per minute that everyone should shoot for, and it's just not true. Right? So how do we take that, for example? Oh, we notice that your cadence is a little bit lower than we think it should be for you based on your height, based on your, um, running ability. And can we coach you in real time with music, with a metronome to work on that cadence? And it takes active work, but over time you can improve something like cadence. These are just honestly pretty simple things that no one has really tackled. And we see an opportunity to tackle them and to do it in a way that's super actionable. And we kind of hold the user's hand through that journey of, of working on this thing. Um, so it's a combination of real time recommendations. But then also, you know, one of the most important things is making decisions about, uh, you know, how much and how hard to train. Every day and every week. Like that's the number one predictor of whether you're going to improve or whether you're going to get injured, right? We all know that. I think most of us know that if we do too much too soon, then we might suffer the consequences, right? Our performance might suffer. We might experience an injury. But one of the innovations we're bringing to market is a better understanding of your training load. We talked about this the other day. It's really mechanical. Load monitoring is what we call it. Right. So many of us are using, um, you know, physiological load monitoring or even just using our weekly mileage or weekly duration to understand how much and how hard we're training and how much stress our body is under. But we're missing a giant piece of the puzzle, which is how much mechanical load physical force is my body experiencing on every run? And, um, how? What does that mean for my risk of injury? And how can I use that to make smarter decisions about how hard and how far to run every day and every week? And we can go into that topic a little bit more, because I think it's a really interesting one. But that's another example of, you know, we can provide people with more personalized prescriptions around, hey, this week and today, this is what we think your body's prepared for. Yeah, I'd love to dive into that because I think it's like it's always interesting, you know, for for me as a coach, when I'm working with a client, a lot of this ends up becoming like a heavily communication based piece to the puzzle, where it doesn't always show up in the data gathering that we have currently. If someone's experiencing a little bit more fatigue than they normally would, and usually what ends up happening is like, you'll have a bad workout or something like that, and, you know, the client reaches out or, or I see it show up as such. And then we're like, hey, let's, let's dive in a little bit. How have you been feeling? How was your motivation? How were your energy levels? What's your like, your patience level? Things that like your kind of early signs of overreaching a little bit and then you make a course. Correct. And then there's a range there to like a new runner might. We might respond after one bad session. Um, because they typically have pretty much more recovery between sessions, given where they're at in the stage versus an athlete that's been training for years and years and years and is skewing more to like higher volume and, uh, higher quality speed work sessions. It's like we might wait a little bit longer for them because, you know, fatigue is just something we're going to have to push into a little bit further to get adaptations out of somebody like that. But having a product that maybe catches that stuff a little bit sooner in that process, or at least gives us some tools to. See that that that that scenario occurring a little bit earlier can eliminate some of that trial and error, some of that mistake making that inevitably happens in running programs where, you know, the other thing you I always tell myself and I tell my coaching clients is like, we have a plan here from day one to race day. It's not going to go perfectly. Like there going to be days that you know, so like, but how do we get we should still be striving for perfection despite it. Not likely. Like it's not going to, despite it not being a reality we should strive for because we're going to get as close to it as we can. So some of these tools maybe allow us to get a little closer to perfect along that, that training, fatigue training, load tolerance side of the equation 100%. Yeah. So let's dive in a little bit deeper there because I think this is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting things that we're bringing to market. And one of the things that I've been using the most with our product is improving and running. You know, when you create that training plan, what you're doing, I know is you're creating a plan that is effectively balancing stress and recovery, right? Like, you don't get better unless you stress your body. So every time you run, you're applying stress that's damaging your body. Um, and with proper recovery, your body adapts and it builds back stronger. You get fitter. Um, and that's the happy scenario, right? Um, and you're able to handle more, more volume, more intensity. Now when your training load exceeds your body is what we call capacity, which is your body's ability to handle that training load. That's when an issue comes up, right? When your performance might suffer, or when you increase your risk of injury, you can think about training load. There are two major buckets of training load. One is what we call physiological. And we've got pretty good tools to monitor that. Um, so this is your body's response to training. And so we're wearing smartwatches, we're wearing other wearables. We're monitoring our heart rate, our HRV. You can even ask runners for their rating of perceived exertion. Or, you know, as you're doing you're asking them for feedback on how they're feeling, their motivation levels. Right. Like these are all signals of how your body responds physiologically to training. That's a really important bucket. But there's another bucket and we call it mechanical load. And this is the bucket of training load that applies that, um, is touching on the physical forces that are applied to your muscles, tendons and bones during running. And until now we haven't had an effective way of measuring this mechanical load. Again, the physical pounding that our body is taking while running. And this also provides a crucial stimulus for our body. It breaks our tissues down. With proper recovery, they build back stronger. But if you're not measuring it, then you can't manage this. And you can't make sure that you're putting enough mechanical stress, mechanical load on your body to elicit the adaptation you're seeking, but not so much that you exceed your body's capacity. And until now, most of us, you know, definitely people who aren't coached. You know, we're probably relying on guidance like, hey, don't increase your weekly mileage by 10%, and we're using weekly mileage or weekly duration to track our training load. And we're using that as a proxy for mechanical load. Unfortunately, it's not a good one. Research has shown that it's either at best oversimplified and at worst just ineffective. It's just too simple. It's not taking into account the intensity of the mileage or duration you're running. It's not taking into account the surfaces you're running on, whether you're running incline or decline, or what shoes you're running in your unique biomechanics. Right. All of these factors influence the amount of mechanical load that your body is experiencing, but they're not captured if you're just using mileage or duration. And so we feel there's a better way in technology. And the way we think about it is every time you hit the ground, there's a force that you're applying to the ground. And in response, there's an equal and opposite what's called ground reaction force. That's what's helping propel your body upward and forward. And that ground reaction force can reach pretty significant levels, up to five times your body weight on every single step. Some of your tissues might even absorb or experience up to 15 times your body weight on every step. So this is very significant, and your body has to be capable of dealing with these forces and recovering from them. And they're influenced again by the speed you're running by the surface, by incline decline, by shoes, by how you move. And a higher ground reaction force is associated with a greater mechanical load. The only way to get this information today is to go run on a force plate in a lab, or run on a treadmill that's got a force sensor instrumented in the treadmill. But now we can make this information available on every single step, not just in the lab, and help runners understand how much mechanical load are they experiencing on every run it takes into account, again, all of these other factors the speed, the surface, your biomechanics help you understand the impact. We call it an impact score, impact score of every run, and how much impact you're absorbing on every week, and then use that to provide really personalized prescriptions around. Here's what we think you can handle this week and today in terms of total mechanical load. And then you can use that to make better decisions around how hard or how far to push every day and every week. And this is a piece of the puzzle that's just been missing for runners until now. And we feel like it's a really important blind spot to shine some light on, and is going to just enable runners to make better, smarter training decisions. Mhm. Yeah that is really interesting. And it sort of feeds into another question I had for you, which is just like how is this product going to be utilized by the consumer or is it something where, hey, I've got to go all in and wear nothing but this? Or is this a tool that you can slide in, gather some data, and then go back to whatever else you were using and kind of spot check with this device versus using it holistically. And one of the reasons why I wanted to ask that question is because what you just described to me is like, okay, we have these different types of workouts that can greatly change that, that mechanical loading piece to the puzzle. So my thought would be kind of like, well, obviously wearing it all the time is going to give you like that total score for say, a week. And if you keep doing that, you can kind of see where that's going. Or the other way I thought about it was you could have someone use this as a training tool and say, like, okay, we're going to have you wear this product during each one of these key sessions and get a data point on how that sort of builds out for you personally. So maybe like the interval session tends to be something that stands out with, um, with a loading pattern. And then you get another specific one for the long run, another specific one for an easy run, and things like that where we can kind of generalize going forward, then what to expect when I apply that sort of a training stimulus, even if they're not wearing the product? Spot on. Yeah. So both are options. Of course, there are some runners who have one shoe and that's the shoe they use for every run. And that's why we wanted to create a versatile shoe. So for that person, you know this is a shoe that they could use for everyone. But we know and many of our team members, myself included, you know, we've got a shoe rotation. It's actually good to mix up your shoes. It's um, you know, it's changing the stimulus, the, um, the stress that you're putting on your body in a good way. Right. It's, um, that that change in variability, it has been shown to actually be potentially beneficial. And so we didn't want to create a product that prevented someone from using their existing shoe rotation. And so what we've done is we can essentially with machine learning, we can model your response to different, uh, different running, running at different paces, running on different surfaces. As long as you run in shoes enough, right. At least, you know, uh, 2 or 3 times a week, 1 to 3 times a week, we will understand enough and create a model for you where we can predict the mechanical load of basically every single running step that you take, even if you're not wearing a velodrome. And so we can use that to still give you insight on the mechanical load of runs that you're doing, even if you're not wearing bellows. The only requirement is that you run in the bellows regularly to keep your data up to date and calibrated, but it doesn't have to be on every run, and that was an important requirement for us. Mhm. Yeah. You know it would be interesting, would be like if you had like the aerobic intensity spectrum on like a chart and then you could plot kind of the mechanical loading up tick as you move up that because it's going to go up across the board or across that, but to what degree. And as you know, it's probably not going to be linear either. Right? There's probably going to be like, I'm glad you said spikes. Yeah. And just having that plot would be interesting. I'm glad you said that because that's a really important thing. I know you, um, you know this as a pro runner and a coach, but a lot of runners, individual runners, don't understand that there is a nonlinear relationship between intensity and damage intensity and load. When you run faster, you're not increasing the mechanical load on your body in a linear fashion. It's a non-linear fashion. So simple. For example, research has shown that if you increase the mechanical load, the magnitude of, of the mechanical load that you take on a step by just 10%, you decrease the number of steps that you can take safely by half, by 50%. So I want to say that again, if you're running at a mechanical load and you can take, let's say, 10,000 steps safely at that mechanical load, just increasing that mechanical load by 10% reduces the number of safe steps you can take from 10,000 to 5000. Then you throw an interval session out at them and it's going to feel like low volume training. And it might look that way too, by the way they are currently assessing. But like you mentioned, that impact loading is potentially way greater or different enough from what they're doing, that it just is going to take a little bit of extra recovery. So kind of explaining to someone who's normally looking at, okay, I did what I was supposed to do, I'm feeling accomplished, that maybe they need to shift that framework in their mind a little bit. Can be one of the things that we need to discuss and like having products that actually spell that out for you in information actually spells that out for a person. So they can see like, oh, this is what's actually happening here. I think it can be a very useful way to kind of teach that lesson 100%. And the other thing that happens is, well, first of all, I think how we feel is critical. We can't ignore that. But having objective data about what's happening can also help better understand the, um, the effect of the training that we're doing. Right. It has to be balanced with how we feel, but we need, I think, both objective and subjective information. I think both are important. And the thing about these harder sessions is, um, you know, our metabolic and cardiovascular system adapts pretty quickly. Like those sessions, even if they feel a little bit challenging the first time, you throw some faster stuff at an athlete, like they'll adapt. They should adapt pretty, pretty well to it. If they're consistent. Their cardiovascular system will adapt faster than their musculoskeletal system. What I mean by that is the paces will start to feel okay or even easier faster than their muscles, tendons and bones are ready to handle more of them, more of those paces. And so that's why it's important to also understand, okay, physiologically I feel pretty good, right? I'm feeling fitter. I'm feeling like I can handle this. I'm feeling like I'm recovering from it faster. Right. My heart rate at these paces might even be coming down. But mechanically, your body needs longer. Your bone needs longer to remodel, right? Like these things just take time. And so having an objective understanding of how much true mechanical load your body is under, and how quickly you should be accelerating, that I think, can just help runners make some of the training errors that we're so prone to making. Mhm. The easy way for people to understand that is to think of endurance sports versus just running. And there's a reason why triathletes and cyclists and swimmers can do higher volume than strict marathon runners. And it's also why I think we're seeing a lot more professionals in even the Olympic distances. And then certainly the ultra running distances start doing more cross training because they can get a higher amount of cardiovascular stimulus and minimize that loading and kind of create a little bit of a bridge from that mismatch to some degree. Uh, which actually is another interesting piece of the puzzle too, because sometimes it's like, uh, I'll get this question from time to time. It's like, we'll have a fairly quality session or something like that. And, then the question comes like, okay, I've got an easy run, or maybe I pre-programmed a bike ride on the schedule and the client said, hey, can I go for an easy run instead of the bike ride? Or should I go for a bike ride instead of an easy run? Well, that mechanical loading piece of the puzzle may be something that's really well worth looking into when that question comes up. Because if it's something where it's like, hey, you feel good, but you're just your mechanical loading is a little higher than it has been recently. So we maybe want to stay away from doing too much of that and kind of delude you a little bit from that. So let's hop on the bike. But because your energy levels are still fine, but your mechanical loading is a little high or, or maybe it checks out and it's like, okay, mechanical loading doesn't scream anything Thinking outside of the norm of what we wouldn't, we would expect. And you can tolerate a little bit more. So if you'd rather go for a run, go for an easy run instead. Uh, I think it's really interesting when you kind of get into those real specific types of questions, what you can kind of do with information like this. 100%, I think, again, there's this misconception maybe from a lot of runners that running is cardio. Yeah, cardio running is an impact sport. Like every time you hit the ground, there's an impact. There might not be as much impact as if you're playing football and you're getting tackled. But like there's, there's a physical stress that's happening on every step and you're taking thousands of steps on every run, even not a long run. Right. Like that adds up. Mhm. No doubt. No doubt. Yeah. Yeah it's interesting stuff. It'll be fun to kind of see how this develops. And I'm excited that someone has taken this on. Um yeah. Thank you. Where are you? Where are you all at in that process? I think you mentioned that you guys are on Kickstarter right now taking pre-orders and hoping to have some shoes for customers if they get on that early list by the end of this year, maybe. Yeah, exactly. So we're taking pre-orders. Uh, we started doing that on Kickstarter about, uh, a few weeks ago. So that'll be running through about mid-August, August 22nd. Um, and, and those who pre-order on Kickstarter will get the shoes first. Um, and so we're planning on delivering a first batch later this year and then the rest of the orders, um, next year, early next year. Very cool. Yeah. Do you guys have a price point for the shoe at this point or. Yeah. So it's going to be a premium product. Obviously there's tech embedded in there. It's going to be in the upper third. So between 200 and $300. Um retail will probably be around 250 for a pair. And then um, you know, there's a membership which includes, of course, the coaching, but then some other perks for people. Um, $9 a month. And then, you know, we're going to play with different pricing models probably over time. There's of course always the trade off of, hey, people are tired of subscriptions. And of course, you know, we're consumers too. So we're like, we see we see that feedback and we've experienced it ourselves. I think ultimately, like we're trying to build a product where we pay $9 a month. It's like a no brainer for you, right? If you're getting great insight, great advice, even if you're not working with a coach, getting great coaching, because our vision is essentially to create for someone who's not able to or, um, you know, isn't working. Can't work with a coach, you know, to give them some guidance. You know, to get that for $9 a month is an incredible value. Obviously, it'll take us some time to get there, but, um, so that's where we're landing right now. You know, we could charge more for the shoe and either charge a smaller subscription or no subscription at all. Uh, no membership at all. Or, you know, go the other way and charge less for the shoe and charge a more of an ongoing fee. There's different examples of this in the wearables market, obviously, like whoop is completely monthly fee ordering is more like what we're doing, right. You've got an upfront fee for the ring. It's more expensive than a pair of shoes. And then, uh, a smaller, ongoing, uh, membership. But that's kind of the hybrid model that we've landed on right now. But of course, pre-orders are getting it at a pretty nice discount. It's, uh, it starts at 200 bucks on Kickstarter. Very cool. Yeah. So if anyone wants to be one of the first to try it out and save a few bucks, that's probably the spot to go. And you said that ends on the 22nd of August. That's right. Cool. Well, really, thanks a bunch for taking some time to chat a bit about tech and kind of the future of running wearable technology. Thank you. Yeah. Where can people go? Yeah. Thanks a bunch. And where can people find you if they want to check into what you're up to, whether it be with, uh, available or just yourself personally? Yeah. The best place is either on Instagram. Um. Um, I'm there. Just, uh, Rollie Metzger is my handler on LinkedIn. Um, try to be active there and post some updates, and then, uh, our running. Com is our website. Um, so there's a place if people are interested in following along, of course, they can sign up for our waitlist. And we send lots of good, not just updates, but also content like science, science driven running content there too. Awesome. Well, I know Brady and I will have to get it on our review schedule for early next year late this year, depending on when we get our hands on some. So we'll 100% add that into the rotation. Yeah, we're eager to get the product in the hands of, uh, testers and reviewers so that, um, you know, runners can can. Very cool. Well, thanks again for your time.