Great Running Barefoot Pics

A barefoot runner named Rick Roeber, Lee's Summit, Missouri, ran the St. Louis Marathon on the 9th. He posted some pictures of himself on his website. One of them showed excellent running form! I'm posting it here for analysis.

These are the good things I see in his form: Straight body, torso and head erect, forward lean, knees bent, feet closely bunched together, ankle flexed, whole body relaxed, and happy! What a great example of good form! Way to go, Rick!

His form reminds me of something else I wrote about running form. I keep noticing forms in the sense of triangles while running. I see shod runners and notice they seem to run as if their head were the apex of a triangle and their feet define the base of the triangle. In other words, their forward stride and backward strides seem to equal eachother so their head is near-center.

However, when I run, I envision that I am an upside-down triangle. My feet are the apex because I'm keeping them centered beneath my torso, trying to keep them confined to mostly up and down movement. If the plane of my body is back towards the rear wall of the triangle, then I'm only running in place. But if I move the plane of my body forward towards the front wall of the triangle, the triangle wants to tip over, and that forward pull moves me forward as I run.

Putting it another way, shod runners make their broad leg movements the source of their locomotion. I make my forward body angle the source of my locomotion. I have experimented with speeding up/slowing down just by changing the angle of my lean. Its kinda cool.

Ryan