Elites and barefoot running

asdfghkv wrote:

Well, until that day, continue to enjoy plodding along at 10-minute miles, and keep telling yourself that everyone can do it because Abebe Bikila, Barefoot Ted, and Christopher McDougal can.

Also, thank you so much for posting evidence that shows that barefoot running prevents degenerative joint disease. I'm so glad you are concerned with backing your points up with solid scientific evidence.

ok, and you're welcome!

asdfghkv wrote:

Also, thank you so much for posting evidence that shows that barefoot running prevents degenerative joint disease. I'm so glad you are concerned with backing your points up with solid scientific evidence.

Also, being an uptight jerk who obsesses over what elites do leads to a heart attack. There is a study being conducted now and you're a participant.

Do you want to run into your 50s (almost there) 60s or 70s, or want to be injured or even crippled in your 30s, like some of my former Div I runner friends?

Your choice doesn't affect me personally. But ... make it with full knowledge.

Yes, I realize that not all shod runners end up seriously injured. But many, many do. The ones still running into their 40s are on the narrow end of a pretty selective pipeline. You don't see all the ones who are sitting at home having given up on running (or exercise) forever.

If you're 20 years old, I don't expect you to pay any heed to me. That's fine. Move along now.

And yes, as a previous poster said, it's about running with good form, not necessarily running barefoot. But good luck trying to learn or maintain good form in a pair of Brooks Beast.

Chris McDougall begins BORN TO RUN by describing how he's been hobbled--by his shoes, it turns out--and how the best running doc (Philly area??) tells him he's too damned big and should stop running altogether.

By the end of the book, he's completing 50+ mile races. Speed isn't really the point.

Like others, I'm not convinced that shoeless running, or Tarahumara sandals, or Vibram Fivefingers, is the way to lower world records--certainly not track records.

By the same token, very fast shoeless runners occasionally do show up. Bikila and Budd come immediately to mind. In 2003 or 2004, I remember seeing a barefoot female competitor in a Dallas-area Octoberfest 10K; she had beautiful form as she headed towards the finish line, bare feet whispering across the pavement. I think she was in the top 3 women. (Name, please?)

There's a dialectical process at work. The minimalist movement is simply a culture's way of pointing out that certain potentially key forms of knowledge have been ignored in a capital-driven drive for modernization and "progress." It's always good to pay attention when "crazy" people show up and...oh, I don't know...suggest that mainframe computers might be supplanted by individual desktop devices. Sometimes needed innovation looks a little kooky from the perspective of settled knowledge. The truth is usually somewhere in between.

ran at the baby race wrote:

The kenyans at my d2 college started wearing shoes to run in, when they came to the US and could afford them. They don't have shoe contracts.

Put up wrote:

The thread is about "elites". D2 Kenyans do not qualify.

ran at the baby race wrote:

They guy I'm talking ran 3:48 last year for 1500. He will eventually be elite. (we hope)

Hey, I "hope" to be elite one day, too, but I'm not now and neither is your Kenyan friends.

kudzurunner wrote:There's a dialectical process at work.

This sentence made me smile.