Sh*t Barefoot Runners Say

This one literally made me laugh out loud.

improve your running form

first a disclaimer:  this post is anecdotal and not scientific, based on my experiences and observations.

now to the heart of the matter.  back when the run was only as important as the bike and the swim, i used to think i ran fast enough and so didn't need to focus much on form.  i also was relatively uninjured back then.  it hasn't been until recent years that i've focused more on the run and, seemingly as a by-product, spent more time injured.  like a large number of others, i sank my teeth more deeply into the question of form after reading Born to Run.  as Joel indicated in his great post on Foot Strike Fads, there is more to the story than simply becoming a forefoot striker, though.  in fact, i personally believe the whole barefoot running fad is an attempt to create the symptoms of better running form rather than a method of obtaining that form itself.  not that it's a bad approach...  muscle memory is what it is, but it's good to understand what it is you're trying to achieve.

what i think we all agree upon here at rrrs is that you listen to many and extract from that what works for YOU, and that no better listening can be done than the listening you do to your own body when you run.

the principles i've applied to moderate success that seem to have stuck are few.  one of them is the idea of running tall.  i sit at a desk all day at work, and don't have great posture to begin with.  it's no wonder that my back gets compressed, causing nerve pain from my hips, to my knees, down into my lower legs and feet.  everything is tied together in that lower back area.  stretching your frame out by running tall frees up those impulse pathways and helps to build a muscle/tendon memory better suited towards running (longer distances). a good friend of mine once told me you should run as if there is a rope tied around your waist and attached to a car which is pulling you.  i use this mental imagery to help myself run tall.

another principle that has worked really well for me is a short stride.  short is obviously a relative term, but you could add to it the concept of more strides per minute to help frame in what i'm getting at.  at first, the shorter stride felt really unnatural.  i was used to stretching my stride out, really pushing the envelope when it came to pace.  as i went out for a run struggling to keep my stride short, i realized i was going uncomfortably slow.  the next thing i noticed was that i was really not feeling better in my running form, because my feet were slapping around, my ankles were locked in a tight angle and i just plain didn't feel relaxed at all.  

this all changed for me one night when i went for a run in the dark.  it was light a light bulb went off, albeit one that did not shed any light on the ground under foot.  running at night without clear sight of the running path causes you to run somewhat tentatively.  some of the characteristics of this tentative running are:  short strides, softened footstrike/impact with the ground and a bit higher leg lift (to avoid unforseen obstacles, slight changes in elevation, sidewalk lips).  in short, sharing a lot of characteristics with what barefoot runners are going for. 

so, running at night taught me that adding the soft ground impact and the slightly higher leg lift to the shorter strides help me "put it all together" in a bit more of a natural way.

one final piece i needed to put all this together what the concept of relaxing my body while keeping my core engaged.  this means my abs are engaged as if i were letting out a soft breath, but no more than that.  my back and shoulders are loose (and i constantly shake them out to ensure they are).  my legs are not tensed up or locked, but loose enough to respond to the ground below me.

as of now, it's still slower...  but the impact to my body is much less, allowing me to run longer and with less pain.  as someone who is looking to run marathons and possibly ultra-marathons, i would consider this a very good thing!!

of course, i'm still learning and still continuing to evolve my form to suit myself.  but, to summarize my current thoughts, here is the short list of principles i am trumpeting:

1. run tall!!  think of a rope tied around your waist attached to a car which is pulling you

2. shorten your stride

3. run softly, no foot slapping, minimize the impact of your foot on the ground

4. lift your legs up

5. RELAX, especially your arms, shoulders, back and, believe it or not, your legs.

take off your shoes, or maybe just try running at night.  regardless, the more you learn, the more you can apply it no matter what shoes you are wearing, how long you're running.

Related Posts:

Foot Strike Fads

my never final say on barefoot running

Running and Form

Barefoot Trail Running Form

I'm a member of the Sierra Club, and enjoy their monthly magazine very much - it always has interesting articles about environmental news, trends, and alerts. This month, there are two articles about running: one is an interview with Scott Jurek and the other is an article about barefoot trail running - obviously inspired by Born to Run - provocatively advertised on the cover as "Thoreau was Wrong".

A few thoughts about the "Silent Running" article, since we've talked a lot about form recently. I don't disagree with anything the author Dianiel Duane writes, but I do disagree with what the article implies, which is that someone can start running barefoot tomorrow with no ill effects. That's the impression I got from phrasings such as this:

there's a wonderful self-limiting quality when you're barefoot. Almost instantly, you find ways to run softly and smoothly. I liked that feeling so much that I bought a pair of shoes called Vibram FiveFingers, which have articulated toes. They're like an artificial callus for people who like the idea of running barefoot but didn't grow up doing so and therefore don't have tough soles.

He does talk about going to see a gait specialist and "doing some drills" but it almost seems perfunctury - as we've talked about, training your muscles to run this way is hard work!

I'm also intregued by this statement:

...[I] soon discovered that a natural gait on a dirt trail reduces impact even further. That's because every stride is different; your feet dance from rock to stick to soil. On flat pavement, you bang away at precisely the same physical imperfections over and over, until you get hurt. On a wandering footpath, impact varies from step to step and thus gets distributed throughout your body.

I haven't done much trail running, but when I have I found all of the different striding to be distracting. I couldn't get into a groove and lost the meditative quality I so enjoy on my longer runs. I should try it again, I suppose, but I'm curious to know what you think?

Barefoot Form

It's too nice of a day not to run. So I went for my first post-race run today and, since I knew I was going to take it slow as my muscles continue to recover from my unusually fast pace (that and all of the golf balls I hit at the driving range yesterday), I decided to try to run with more of the “barefoot form” that I’ve been reading so much about, namely, focusing on landing on the ball or mid-foot as opposed to the heel. (Don't have the book in front of me, but MacDougall wrote very well about it in Born to Run as something like "how you naturally run when you aren't wearing shoes" which is what I envisioned doing today.) Here are my quick reactions:

- Easy to do going up hills, very awkward going downhill.
- Feels strange but okay on the flats, but was difficult for me to do as my legs got tired at the end of the run.
- At times, it felt like my heels weren’t touching the ground at all. I know they weren’t, but that’s what it felt like.
- Feel great afterwards, but know why everyone says to ease into it – I could really feel my shin muscles working. If I attepted to run like that everyday at my usual pace, I’m sure I would really feel bad before too long unless I adapted my shin muscles to the new workload.

In short, I was encouraged by my experiment. Overall, it did feel better than I had thought it would. Next up, i'm going to research of minimalist shoes and see if that's worth using (although probably not the five-finger ones).