The Barefoot Experiment

Last week, a new article over on the Runner’s World website caught my eye.  Authored by William Roberts, MD, it appeared in their Ask the Sports Doc section and was entitled The Mechanics of Barefoot Running.  I’m always excited to see something on the topic of barefoot running appear over there, or in their print magazine, because it means that the subject is getting mainstream exposure.  There have been pro-barefoot as well as no-barefoot articles that have appeared, and there is... (more...)

Photo by Justin Bastien, snagged and cropped from scottjurek.com Scott Jurek, vegan ultramarathon athlete and seven-time consecutive winner of the Western States 100 (really, that’s just the tip of the iceberg) just alerted his Twitter followers to a great article about him in today’s New York Times. Diet and Exercise to the Extremes, by Mark Bittman, takes a quick look at what it’s like to have “training weeks of 140 miles and more, ‘easy’ runs of 40 miles and... (more...)

One of the most important weapons in the arsenal of any athlete, be they amateur or professional, is sleep.  Regular, deep, quality sleep.  In fact, sleep is one of the most important periods of the day for any person, be they athlete or not.  It’s when our bodies recuperate, rebuild and repair the damage done, both physically and mentally, during our demanding waking hours. Knowing first hand the strong sleep requirements that can be demanded by the body, I was particularly blown away... (more...)

A great article appeared in the April issue of Running Times entitled Much Ado About Minimalism.  The author did a great job of capturing the goal of minimalist running.  A goal that I wish many of the zealots would keep in mind. “Away from the hype and the extremes, the minimalist movement is rightly correcting decades of drifting in the other direction when it comes to running shoe design. At its core, minimalism asks the runner to look for the least amount of shoe he or she can safely... (more...)

Thanks to a heads-up from Skora Athletics via twitter (@skoraRunning), I recently read a nice little article from Marine Corps Times on the subject of barefoot running. “The human body is a marvel of engineering and perfectly capable of running without the aid – or really the restriction – of shoes,” says Palma, a founding officer of the recently launched Barefoot Runners Society, which is organizing chapters across the country. He says he has been a kind of quiet evangelist for... (more...)

Brooks CEO Jim Weber, as featured on their blog with his open letter. Just days before the big news regarding the publication of the Lieberman research in the journal Nature, I was alerted (by Scott Jurek, the superhuman ultrarunner, via Twitter) to a new white paper (entitled Barefoot Running : Our Perspective) by Brooks Running that addresses the question of barefoot running. In conjunction with the white paper, Brooks CEO Jim Weber published An Open Letter to the Running Community and invited... (more...)

It’s only one day old, yet it’s so popular that it’s almost old news at this point! I’m speaking about the latest issue of the journal Nature (volume 463) and its cover story:  “TREAD SOFTLY  How we ran in comfort before the invention of shoes”.  Inside is an article by Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University entitled “Foot strike pattern and collision forces in habitually barefoot versus shod runners.” The question of whether barefoot is better has generated enormous... (more...)

Roderick Russell on stage. Click for more images. I couldn’t pass this one up. As a professional performing hypnotist and, now, a runner, I was slightly amused by Mark Remy’s “blog post” over on Runner’s World, written in celebration of World Hypnotism Day, which is today (January 4th). It’s just “juvenile dreck” and not “a cogent look at the power of hypnosis,” but heck, I like juvenile dreck just as much as the next guy. Short, cute and... (more...)

The Skeptoid blog treats the question of barefoot running. There can be no doubt that I’ve fully embraced this barefoot running practice.  I’m obsessive.  I sing the virtues that I’ve thus far discovered.  Frankly, I’m quite stunned at my continuing success.  But I’m also skeptical.  Skepticism permeates the very fabric of my being, and though I’m pushing forward full force with my barefoot experiment, it’s precisely that – an experiment. No, it’s not a “well controlled”... (more...)

It seems that in the wake of Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run, many of the mainstream news sources that I read every day are awash with articles on running, running barefoot and running long distances. The New York Times is one of those publications, and today saw a great article on barefoot running by Gretchen Reynolds titled, simply, Is Running Barefoot Better for You? screenshot of October 21, 2009 edition of The New York Times online Harvard professor of human evolutionary biology... (more...)