Sports Scientist’s Wife Sick of Hearing How Sex and Isolated Anthropometric Measures Do Not Explain Individual Differences in Responsiveness to Advanced Footwear Technology in Highly Trained Runners
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The wife of a local sports scientist is fed up with her husband’s “boring shop talk,” Dumb Runner has learned, and feeling increasingly desperate for a way to make it stop.
“If I have to hear one more time how sex and isolated anthropometric measures do not explain individual differences in responsiveness to advanced footwear technology in highly trained runners,” said Kelly LeBrock, 42, “I swear I’m going to snap.”
The reference was to a recent paper co-authored by LeBrock’s husband of eight years, Wyatt Donnelly, Ph.D., a researcher at the Hughes Institute for Sports Science. Donnelly has been telling her about it for weeks, LeBrock said—and that’s just the latest in a long string of such instances.
“Before this, all he talked about was biomechanical factors associated with intraindividual differences in running economy across advanced footwear technology models in long-distance runners,” LeBrock said. “Or ground contact time as an indicator of metabolic cost in elite distance runners.”
Donnelly, as neither a researcher or a runner herself, said she has “zero interest in these topics.”
“I try to be a supportive partner, but holy shit is this stuff dull,” she said. “It’s gotten to the point where I dread asking him how his day went.”
Reached for comment, Donnelly characterized his latest study as “fascinating.”
“Anthropometric measures investigated were height, body mass, foot length, femur and tibia length, and Achilles tendon length,” he said. “Females showed significantly lower absolute EC than males across all speeds and shoe conditions (p < 0.05), but ΔEC did not differ between sexes (p = 0.5). Average individual ΔEC ranged from 1.1% to 6.4% in females and 0.2% to 8.7% in males.”
“Crazy, right?” he said.
