Skip to main contentMost people don't jog like cats. Robert Vervloet is convinced that they should.
Vervloet recently demonstrated his "kitty running" technique at the RiverPlace Athletic Club.
Squatting in nearly a sitting position on the treadmill, the hulking 6-foot-4-inch Vervloet (pronounced "fur-flute") swung one foot in front of the other, rather than striding in two parallel tracks as most runners do. Instead of pounding up and down, his size-14 Reeboks barely left the ground. And rather than swaying rhythmically, his hips, arms and upper body remained as still as a post.
With his Brillo-pad hair, his turquoise-blue eyes bugged out, and his none-too-clean T-shirt glued to his chest, Vervloet, 40, looked like central casting's version of a mad scientist.
He leapt from the treadmill, winded. Saliva flying, he launched into a high-decibel disquisition about the evils of rising knees and swinging arms. "Look at her," Vervloet said, pointing to a woman on an adjacent treadmill. "She's wasting a lot of energy."
Vervloet's ideas about running--which he claims make people faster, more efficient and less injury-prone--have been called "genius" by Portland State track coach Tony Veney.
But to many people who have encountered him, Vervloet seems wacky--or even worse.
"Can you imagine what it's like to be so smart that people think you're crazy?" asks Vervloet.
As he can attest, brains do not guarantee success. A sign on the door of the dank 10-foot-by-10-foot bedroom in the Southeast Portland house that Vervloet shares with three others says "Work in Progress." That's an understatement for a guy who has a résumé unmatched by his classmates at Oregon Episcopal School and Catlin Gabel.
Try this: After leaving Portland State University, Vervloet found work impersonating a woman for a Portland phone-sex service. "Somebody told me, 'You don't know what it's like being a woman,' so I thought I'd find out," he explains. "But the real women [at the service] didn't like me because I made more money than they did."
Vervloet then sold sex toys and donned rubber gloves to swab out private viewing booths at Fantasy Video. "I got what I wanted out of the job," he says. "People say 'sex sells,' and I wanted to know why."
Vervloet carpal-tunnelized himself making lattes at a coffee cart at the Fred Meyer on Walker Road in Beaverton, but he says the pain was worth it. "The product reps who visited the store told me I made the best coffee in the whole country," he recalls.
He hawked futons for America the Beautiful Dreamer at Mall 205. "People go to school to learn how to make money," he says. "But nobody teaches you how to spend it. I wanted to learn how retail works."
Vervloet acknowledges that for a guy who once vowed to be a millionaire by the age of 30, he's a little behind. But there's a reason: "I can't work in jobs that involve any level of intellectual competition," he explains. "Because as soon as I start talking, I get called 'crazy.'"
And, boy, can he talk. Give Vervloet an opening and he'll tell you that Victoria's Secret was named after Queen Victoria; that the Empire State Building was originally designed to dock air ships; that Holland had the lowest rate of teenage pregnancy in the 1920s and still does; that the training video games the Portland Police Bureau bought for $57,000 are useless.
Vervloet is a veritable Vesuvius of information, much of it connected in ways clear only to him and all of it delivered in a nonstop fusillade inches from his listener's face.
His soliloquies often go unappreciated. Earlier this year, during a stint selling used cars at Tonkin Toyota on Southeast 122nd Avenue, Vervloet, by his own admission, drove co-workers nuts. In August, one colleague, whom Vervloet knew only as "Alex," slipped a noose around Vervloet's neck from behind and tugged--not gently. Pressed for an explanation, Vervloet says that Alex explained, "Robert, you say some crazy shit."
What kind of crazy shit? Well, for example, Vervloet remembers a discussion about disciplining children. "I told them with my son, I just bit him on the ear," he says. "That's how lions and other cats discipline their young. You've got total control, and you can whisper to them while you're biting."
Vervloet quit selling cars but maintains an occasional gig as a car psychic on the radio. Callers tell him the make, year and color of their vehicles, and he describes their personalities. "You drive what you are," Vervloet says. It's a seemingly logical assertion, complicated by the fact that he doesn't own a vehicle.
Over the past year, Vervloet says, he has performed on dozens of stations. In October, he took his crystal ball to Portland country station KUPL (98.7 FM). Typical was a caller named Jeanette, who told Vervloet she piloted a white 1999 Ford F-350 truck with a blue interior.
"You have a hard time dealing with conflict," Vervloet told her. "You've got to take some personal-communication classes."
"That's weird," Jeanette squealed, "because I am taking [personal-communication] classes!"
Vervloet cites an inspiration for his approach--an article about early automotive focus groups in a 1957 edition of Car Life magazine that lurks in his library between former U.S Attorney General Edwin Meese's "Report on Pornography" and Black's Legal Dictionary.
The overburdened bookcase in Vervloet's bedroom reveals a smattering of his interests. Books such as The Century of the Surgeon, Fabulous Fallacies and Zeppelin: The Story of Lighter-Than-Air Craft cluster together under a sea of old newspapers and faded pictures of Vervloet's son.
"He always was a voracious reader," recalls his older brother, Bart. "There's no question that he's very intelligent."
Brains aside, Vervloet struggles with everyday relationships. Most people's school memories include friends, a favorite teacher or perhaps the prom. Asked to name one friend from his school days, however, Vervloet cannot. "I hated school," he says. His recollections are of getting shoved face-first into lockers, having his bookbag stolen and facing constant ridicule for being different. "I remember going to school one day in fourth grade with a crescent wrench in my hand," he says.
Life in Beaverton with his parents and three siblings was little better. "Calling me an idiot was the family sport," Vervloet claims. (His brother Bart strenuously denies that Robert was treated any differently than his siblings; Vervloet's parents declined to comment for this story.)
Vervloet married Diane Barksdale, a nurse, in 1987, a fact that he neglected to mention to his family, Bart says, until well after the fact. Vervloet's in-laws were not big fans. "When I went to my wife's family reunion," he recalls, "her mother introduced me as, 'This is the worthless idiot my daughter married.'"
While it would be inaccurate to call Vervloet an idiot, he was a poor student. After he floundered in public elementary school, his parents enrolled him at Catlin Gabel and OES. There, he floundered more expensively. At Beaverton's Sunset High, Vervloet says he graduated third from the bottom of his class.
His parents offered to pay for college if he agreed to major in engineering or computer science. Vervloet took up the challenge, he says, and located a college in Georgia affiliated with Six Flags that offered a major in amusement-park ride engineering.
His parents balked, and Vervloet ended up at Portland State. He never graduated, he says, because he wasn't allowed to major in his field of choice--video games. As always, he produces an explanation: Students can major in film, and the game industry is now larger than the movie industry; why not study video games?
And why not attend a conference for lesbians? Most men probably wouldn't have much interest in doing so, but one Saturday in 1986, Vervloet noticed a sign advertising a conference sponsored by the PSU women's studies department in cooperation with the Lesbian Community Project. When he tried to enter the conference, security guards bounced him.
Vervloet filed a sexual-discrimination complaint with the Bureau of Labor and Industries and a lawsuit against PSU and conference organizers. Neither action proved successful, but Vervloet still thinks he was right. "It was a matter of principle," he says.
Principle, he claims, has also kept him apart from his son, now 14. The terms of his 1991 divorce allowed Vervloet visitation rights only during the day and only if he picked his son up at his parents' house.
Still furious about those conditions, Vervloet hasn't seen or talked to his son--or his former wife--since 1992. He has also severed ties with the rest of his family, who don't even know where he lives. "It's like having a dead brother who's still alive," says Bart Vervloet.
The world--and certainly Portland--is full of misunderstood souls pushing offbeat ideas, but there is an underlying logic in Vervloet's theories that makes him difficult to ignore.
Janis Skreen, a senior business analyst at Intel and a friend of Vervloet's, says that Vervloet's lack of credentials undermines his success. "I think he's brilliant," Skreen says. "He has a tremendous intellect and processes information in a brilliant way, but he can't find anybody to listen to him."
Necessity--in the form of empty pockets--turned Vervloet into a freelance human-performance guru. Broke and carless after his divorce, he faced a big problem. "I needed some transportation to get to work, and with what I had left, all I could buy was an old bike or some skates. " he recalls. "I chose the skates."
Soon he was spending winter evenings zooming around the esplanade at Memorial Coliseum with Portland's top in-line skaters. But he quickly grew frustrated with his inability to keep pace with them.
He consulted a manual on high-performance planes. He was intrigued by the Grumman X-29A, an experimental fighter that had wings angled forward rather than backward. Forward-pointing wings gave the plane unparalleled efficiency and maneuverability, but they also made it highly unstable.
Vervloet attempted to mimic the plane's forward orientation but struggled with his balance. One day, he observed a caged praying mantis in an pet store. The insect's grace inspired him to skate more upright. He then looked for a way to increase his power. That led him to copy the grasshopper's leg motion because, he says, no other insect has such a proportion of leaping ability to body weight.
The resulting technique looks nothing like the arm-pumping standard. Vervloet skates with his arms pulled together in front of his face (see cover photo), and rather than leaning forward, he sits back on his haunches, his spine nearly straight and his weight on his heels. He pushes forward rather than backward, pedaling his feet furiously like a cartoon figure slipping on ice. The result, Vervloet says, is that he is a much faster skater.
Now, even when not he's not skating, Vervloet habitually mimics a mantis by standing on one leg, which he says saves energy.
Vervloet got serious about his version of biomechanics while working the gym in the downtown Marriott hotel from 1995 until earlier this year. "It was my own personal fitness lab," he says.
Looking for a way to improve his strength and aerobic fitness for skating, Vervloet experimented on the Marriott's rowing machine. But he wasn't satisfied with the legs-back-arms order of the traditional rowing stroke and soon developed a new technique, modeled on the strike-and-recoil motion of a snake. Vervloet claims that rowing like a snake generates far more power than the classic method, allowing him to max out the measurement on the Marriott's rowing machine.
Tiff Wood says Vervloet may be on to something. Wood, a Harvard-educated, three-time U.S. Olympic rower and longtime board member of U.S Rowing, is now an actuary in Portland.
At Vervloet's invitation, Wood came to the Marriott to test the new technique. "He certainly seems like an original thinker," Wood says. "His ideas potentially could develop tremendous power in a single stroke."
A lot more people jog than row--but, Vervloet realized, many of them do so rarely or quit altogether because of pain. In his mind, that meant there must be a better way to run. One day, while idly watching cats in his neighborhood, Vervloet thought he'd found it.
Runners hurt themselves by pounding their feet against pavement, he explains, but cats survive by being quiet, which means no pounding footsteps.
Cats hunker down before running. Their hips are low, their knees flexed, and they pull, rather than push themselves forward. In motion, their feet fly one in front of the other rather than in parallel tracks as many people's feet do, which Vervloet says generates more forward movement--and less pounding--with each stride. "Kitty running" was born.
But as other original thinkers have found since even before Isaac Newton watched an apple fall, the difference between having a good idea and getting people to accept it is like the difference between an apple seed and an apple tree.
Initially, Vervloet approached the U.S. Olympic Committee and Nike, hoping to get funding to test his ideas. But without proof that his ideas worked, he couldn't get funding, and without funding, he couldn't get a real lab or convince elite athletes to invest the time needed to learn his techniques.
Next, Vervloet began carpet-bombing influential figures in various sports, including top skaters, running gurus and rowing coaches. After a long correspondence, Vervloet traveled to Emmaus, Penn., last year to put on a cat-running clinic for Amby Burfoot, the editor of Runner's World magazine. Burfoot, the winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon, says none of his colleagues could replicate the 20-percent gains of in speed and efficiency that Vervloet promised, but he was impressed by Vervloet's passion.
This fall, Vervloet explained his ideas about running to Portland State track coach Tony Veney. Veney, who has coached U.S international teams, says that Vervloet's technique is more suited to distance running than his specialty, sprinting, but it deserves serious study. "He's very, very smart," says Veney of Vervloet. "I would call him a genius."
Wood also believes that Vervloet's ideas deserve further exploration. "If I were a rowing coach at a small program, I would certainly spend some time trying to get to really understand what he's proposing." But Wood acknowledges that it will be difficult to sell an novel idea to the rowing establishment--and indeed Vervloet's presentation at a national rowing conference went largely ignored.
Part of Vervloet's problem may be that following his train of thought is sometimes like tracking Osama bin Laden's whereabouts. "What he's going to find is that as long as he makes references to racehorses, grasshoppers and fleas, he's going to have a very mixed reception in track and field," Veney says.
Vervloet's best reception comes from the wounded. "The way you have worked out the systems of walking and exercise, which feel as if they are doing exactly the correct thing, are amazing," wrote Victoria Banner, a California computer consultant who couldn't run without pain until she met Vervloet.
David Cooper, co-founder of the International Inline Skating Association, found that Vervloet's technique allowed him to skate despite painful disc problems. "Will his method be a revolution?" Cooper asked rhetorically. "Not for racers, only because they're as myopic as all elite groups. I believe if anyone would adopt it, it would be new skaters and folks who had serious issues with their backs."
For all the times Vervloet has been called a crackpot, it turns out he's closer to the mainstream than he might first appear. Researchers at several universities are currently studying the way various animals move. At Oregon State, for example, assistant zoology professor Thomas Roberts has put been putting turkeys on treadmills for years. He hopes his research will lead to a better understanding of how people run--and how they might do so better. "There's a lot we can learn about humans by studying animals," Roberts says.
Besides people who are injured, those most receptive to Vervloet are fellow mavericks. Leading horse trainers used to think that Tom Ivers, an equine sports-medicine expert at Windy Ridge Farms in Washougal, Wash., was crazy because he insisted on carefully chosen diets and vigorous exercise for thoroughbreds. But since Ivers helped Da Hoss win two Breeders' Cups in the '90s, his ideas don't seem so bizarre anymore.
Ivers came into contact with Vervloet when the latter came to Windy Ridge to film himself skating on Ivers' horse treadmill. "I found him very intelligent, a really bright kid," Ivers says. He sympathizes with Vervloet's struggles. "For every innovator, there are a hundred self-appointed protectors of the past," Ivers says.
In darker moments, Vervloet has considered giving up the fight to prove his ideas work and masquerading as an average Joe, but then he comes up with another idea. His latest theory: Baseball players might be able to avoid throwing injuries by mimicking the swimming motion of octopuses. "I've tried it out with a couple of high-school pitchers, but I haven't gotten very far," he says. "Yet."
Robert Vervloet was the subject of an earlier
article (see "A Bug's Life," July 7, 1999).
Vervloet was born in the Netherlands. His father, Dr. Albert Vervloet, coached the 1960 Dutch Olympic rowing team.
Vervloet says he exchanged half a dozen phone calls with Blazers coach Mike Dunleavy in the summer of 2000, hoping to help the Blazers' team chemistry by connecting them with military trainers at Fort Lewis, Wash. (He has a letter from Dunleavy authorizing him to set up "an exchange of skills between Ft. Lewis and the Blazer organization.")
Among those Vervloet has contacted about his ideas are K.C. Boutiette, a member of the U.S. speed (ice) skating team; Yasmin Farooq, a former Olympic rowing coxswain and NBC Olympic rowing commentator; and Bob Ernst, the rowing coach at the University of Washington.
Researchers at Harvard have put emus, prong-horn antelope and kangaroos on treadmills. Canadian researchers have studied penguins in an attempt to design better foul-weather gear, and the U.S. Navy has developed robots modeled on lobsters to destroy undersea mines.
WWeek 2015