Next week at Luke’s Locker in Dallas we’re hosting a Natural Running Symposium, the first in a series of national educational seminars hosted by some of the top experts in running form, biomechanics and injury prevention.

This is a free, open to the public event featuring Newton Running co-founder and running form expert Danny Abshire, Newton’s R&D/Education director and adventure racing world champ Ian Adamson, and running science expert Dr. Mark Cucuzzella. On Tuesday evening, the team will lead an informative discussion about biomechanics, injury prevention and running shoe design. Then on Wednesday morning, Danny, Ian and Mark will lead a Natural Running form clinic starting at the Dallas store.

The details:

What: Natural Running Symposium

When: Tues., March 2 @ 6 p.m.

Where: Luke’s Locker, Dallas (3607 Oak Lawn Avenue) 214-528-1290

Hope to see you there…tell your friends!

Our next Symposiums will be March 19-20 at Marathon Sports in Boston and March 25-26 at Road Runner Sports in San Diego. Stay tuned for more dates and details.

Here’s a great shot of Luis Guerrero from Mexico with his pacer Stephen Gartside from Newton Running. Luis is all smiles running down from 12,600-foot Hope Pass during the Leadville Trail 100 Race Across the Sky this past weekend. Luis is Newton’s retail partner in Mexico with several trailsport retail stores.  Luis wore his new Sir Isaac guidance trainers for the last 39.5 miles of the race and had great things to say about how the new shoes performed. At age 46, Luis was 12th overall at Leadville, finishing early Sunday morning in a time of 20 hours and 48 minutes.

Nice work Luis! We’re proud of ya!

Here we are, one year after beginning to sell through specialty running and multisport stores around the world. To celebrate this special milestone we hosted our top-performing retail accounts for the first ever Newton Retail Summit in Boulder, Colorado. Each morning began with group runs lead by some of our top pro athletes, including Josh Cox, Craig Alexander and Chris Legh, as well as form coaching from our co-founder Danny Abshire. We showed off the Newton Running Lab, presented Newton technology and held retailer feedback forums. During the general sessions a variety of running industry gurus shared their expertise, including injury prevention guru Mark Cucuzzella, M.D., four-time Olympian Lorraine Moller of The Lydiard Foundation and Brian Metzler of Running Times magazine. The highlight of the event was the debut of the Sir & Lady Isaac guidance trainer, with the entire group test driving the shoes in advance of the early September release. We look forward to making this an annual event!

Pictured above is the group just before a scenic run up Flagstaff Mountain.

(Danny Abshire, Marco Garsed, Jerry Lee)

Newton Running would like to extend a hearty, double helping of congratulations to Marco Garsed this morning. First, Marco’s store, Tri-sition Area in San Antonio is Newton’s Retailer of the Month for June. It’s an awesome shop filled with all the best multi-sports gear and a staff of experienced, helpful triathletes to personalize your service. They are big believers in forefoot running and spread the Newton gospel in the heart of Texas.

In addition to running a successful specialty retail store, Marco also finds time to train for his own racing, and yesterday he completed a life long dream in Coeur d’ALane.  Marco is officially an Ironman and the Newton crew was there to support and cheer him along. We’re proud of you Marco!

(Marco starting the run at Ironman CDA, still smiling despite the rain)

Science and innovation are cornerstones of our business at Newton Running. Over ten years ago, when Newton Running co-founder Danny Abshire first started testing radically different running shoe prototypes, he recognized  the importance of a quantitative, scientific results to prove Newton technology designs worked. However, Danny soon learned that current lab testing is  antiquated and frustrating ’science’ at best. For years now, the standardized running shoe lab test has consisted of a piston that hammers down on the heel of a shoe to test cushioning. There are numerous problems with this testing method, but first and most obviously, it only evaluates the heel – not very useful for Newton shoes, which focus technology in the forefoot of the shoe.

Enter: MIT graduate students.

For their 200 level engineering class, a team of MIT engineering students spent the last semester developing a new running shoe lab test. Here’s the abstract from their presentation:

“Current ASTM tests on running shoes are insufficient because they do not reliably capture the loads and displacements applied to shoes during running. This team will discuss a 3-axis machine that can be used to test running shoes that mimic’s natural running more accurately than conventional tests. The design is comprised of a phantom foot that replicates the passive properties of a human foot and an actuated base that can impose the relevant kinematics to the running shoe. The shoe is mounted on motor to give a rotational degree of freedom. The shoe and the base are instrumented to measure force and displacement dynamically during the running cycle. The machine can be calibrated to emulate different types of runners by adjusting the trajectories of the base. As a proof of concept we have collected force, displacement and energy data from the machine.”

Click here to watch a presentation of the innovative testing machine the students designed. We’re thoroughly impressed with the results that the test has yielded so far. The design is patent pending and we’re excited about the possibilities to use a machine like this for our future testing.

Our terrific Japanese distributor just sent us the below scan (click image to enlarge) from the January issue of Triathlon Japan magazine. None of us speak Japanese so we have no idea what it says, but judging by the great photos it looks like a terrific review. They even cut open one of the shoes to see the Action/Reaction Technology up close. We’ll post a translation once we get it.

By the end of this month, Newton Running shoes will be available at several specialty retailers in both Japan and the UK. One of our international distributors just sent us these cool photos:

October 26 at the Japanese National Triathlon Championships in Tokyo.

And Team Triathlon Consultants after the Marlow Half Marathon in the UK (from left: Lander, Mike Martin, Mike Trees, Nick McHuh and Rieko Trees on top!). Mike Trees was 2nd out of more than 1,000 runners in the race

Check this page on the Newton website soon for a list of Newton retailers in Japan, the UK and growing list of other countries.

Newton continues to expand around the globe. In the past few weeks, we’ve opened stores in Costa Rica, Singapore and the U.K.

Newton Costa Rica

Aviva Ironman 70.3 Newton booth at a shopping centre in Singapore

TriCentral gets Newton in the U.K.