When the ligaments are “exercised” by stretching, they respond by synthesizing new collagen-but the molecular response peaks in about ten minutes and begins to switch off if exercise continues beyond that time. That lack of turnover is one of the main reasons tendon and ligament injuries take so long to heal.īut Baar’s petri-dish ligaments, grown from the remnants of ruptured ACLs collected during reconstructive surgeries, suggest there are ways to wake up that inert connective tissue and promote healing. When Danish scientists analyzed Achilles tendons from cadavers a few years ago, they found telltale traces of carbon isotopes emitted into the atmosphere by nuclear-bomb testing in the 1950s and ’60s-indicating that in the average person, repair and regeneration of the tendon’s core pretty much stops by age 18. The traditional view is that connective tissue is essentially inert.
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Their conclusion: in our obsessive pursuit of stronger muscles and hearts, we’ve failed to understand how to train and feed connective tissue like ligaments, tendons, bones, and cartilage. Over the past decade, Baar and his colleagues have been growing “engineered ligaments” in their lab, then subjecting them to all sorts of abuse to understand what factors affect injury risk. Wartenburg, a former director of track and cross country at the University of California at Davis, was following the advice of Keith Baar, who heads the university’s Functional Molecular Biology Lab. To be successful, she would need to stay healthy, he explained, and to stay healthy, she should start making Jell-O. Her new coach at the NorCal Distance Project, Drew Wartenburg, sent her an e-mail before she arrived.
She’d endured a metatarsal stress fracture in her foot, a nasty case of plantar fasciitis, tendinitis in her flexor hallucis longus, and a tear in her plantar plate, a ligament-like structure under the ball of the foot. By the time professional runner Kate Grace decided to move from Bend, Oregon, to Sacramento, California, in the summer of 2015, she’d become a reluctant expert in the anatomy of the foot and lower leg.
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