A little over a year ago, I made a promise to myself after losing a card of mine. It really annoyed me so I decided that I’d run 10km for every item I lose. This may not seem like much but I was training for a marathon at the time so any extra distance was a heavy sigh. For context, I had been running for months, at least 7km every weekday, and a little over 15K on average, over the weekends. I remember clocking in about 400km+ in practice, running a half marathon and a full marathon within the same year. Looking back at it, I’m really proud of myself but it made my knee feel funny afterwards.

So, I’ve been running casually since but here’s the thing: I lost 2 items recently. I was gonna call it bad luck and let myself off the hook but if everything happens for a reason then this may be a canon event. Siri, play Am I Dreaming from Spider-Verse.

So yeah, 20km. A year ago, I would be tossing my head back into a heavy groan and punching the air if it weren’t the for my recent finding that running backwards is advantageous. Here’s a list of benefits:

- more effort than running forward, which means more calories burnt (“30% metabolic more metabolic energy expenditure than forward running")
- strengthens your knees and ligaments
- reduces injury, increases lower body strength and power (glutes, calves)
- improves forward running

(Technically, I shouldn’t link my findings cause it’s really bad for the website’s SEO but good research should be credited)

Short story long, I started running backwards. It’s really weird at first because humans aren’t biomechanically built to move like that, so it raises our proprioception (awareness of the body’s movement in space). I noticed this when I kept glancing backwards to make sure I wouldn’t tumble on the treadmill. I also realised that my muscles were a lot more active in my posterior chain, specifically my hamstrings.

Here are my stats for last weekend:

I wonder if there’s a difference between tracking the stats for forward and backward running on conventional treadmills