This is the fourth video in the question and answer session that followed the presentation. Questions that the audience asked were about what happens to recycled shoes and whether you should run barefoot first or get Newtons first if you want to transition into more natural running.
John: Kevin?
Audience: I was just wondering…hearing the benefits of barefoot running, and these countries that have benefited from barefoot running forever. Will we still keep a policy of recycling our old injury-prone stability shoes to those countries?
(Audience Laughs)
Danny: As long as they promise just to walk in them! What a greaty way to well, you know, we’ll try to slow the Kenyans down…
John: We’re sending them all to Nike so that they grind them up for courts.
Danny: You know, Jamie was right. Abebe Bakila won the ’60 Olympics but here’s the story, he’s a Kenyan runner that never used shoes. Never used shoes in his life. Came to Rome, I mean hey, cobblestones and all kinds of crap. Adidas is going to sponsor you. They gave him a pair shoe that didn’t fit. And he goes, if I get blisters I’m out.
So he said, I forego shoes, I’m running barefoot. The guy won the race. He came back 4 years later, won Mexico wearing a pair of minimalist Asics I believe or New Balance, one or the other. So anyhow, hiss feet were as tough as leather right? That’s the same thing. If we go out on our baby skinned feet on that run that you were just talking about, that’s different if you’ve conditioned them over 2 years, it’s different if you come from a country that you never wear shoes.
Audience: Well let me follow up with a question, I guess.
Do you think the average person here who’s even interested in learning how to change their style of running into a more natural style to do it quicker barefoot or with Newtons?
John: That’s a good question.
Danny: I think you’d do it quicker with Newtons.
Because you’re less apprehensive, like you said, the lady who tried to walk down the hallway barefoot felt totally abnormal, whereas at least the first thing you do with Newtons is you feel the lugs. If you feel the lugs, you can feel the ground.
So the idea is, I know for sure, because I can take all of you in this room right now, and I can teach you how to run in about 5 minutes. And you would be doing it. You just have to practice and break your old habits.
John: I think it’s a combination. I think it’s a combination; I think Danny is correct in terms of Newton really helping you into that position, but I think it takes repetition and practice in order to achieve that. And I don’t have anything against doing both.
Kirsten: I’m going to go against that entirely.
John: Oh god! Would you?
Kirsten: I would.
I would go right straight into the bare feet kind of thing.
For me, and I think it’s from my standpoint of when you have the climate that if you can do it, it’s a proprioceptive piece.
It’s the ability to feel. I think it’s a little bit when you’re trying to teach. There’s some people like Danny who are probably great teachers because he’s been able to do that.
Trying to teach somebody to run lightly, or to run quietly and things like that. And to get their mechanics, or if you’re working with kids type of thing. I think, for me anyway, trying to guess, because somebody asked me that too. Would you go from a shoe to a minimalist then to bare feet? Or would you go to from shoe to bare feet then to minimalist? I probably as a piece of it would go shoe to bare feet, because I like the idea of the proprioceptive piece of things.
Audience: What about mixing it up so you can get accustomed or you can phase into this system…
John: It’s really adaptation. And Danny who took us through Good Form Running or Natural Running out in Boulder, I mean he’s right. Standing tall, shortening your stride, getting into a cadence, it’s alignment, moving forward, those principles exist. And you’re right too. Running barefoot can propel that and bring it on just as well, if not faster sometimes.
Danny: So just as a starter, that’s what we do at all our running clinics. The first thing we do is before we start anything is I make everyone take their shoes off, and we do a couple of easy strides.
And every single person has beautiful form. Serious. You were there, we run up and down the… It’s a beautiful turf field and we know nothing is on it. So let’s run down and back. So everybody was shocked at first with Newton Running was taking our shoes off.
I said this was part of the equation. It’s that whole body kinematics. You snap to it. You snap to it when your shoes are off because you’re neutral with gravity, you have the sensory input. So I say now let’s run. Everybody falls forward, arms come back, tilt forward, high cadence, just there. It doesn’t matter, we all do it. So as soon as you feel that you go, “Oh! That’s part of what it’s about.”
Then you put your shoes on, you mimic that. It’s harder to mimic that with a higher heel I can tell you that much.
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The Natural Running Symposium took place in October of 2010 at the Maine Running Company. Danny Abshire from Newton Running, Kirsten Buchanan from Impact Sports Medicine and Jamie Raymond from Raymond Chiropractic joined John Rogers to talk about barefoot and natural running in front of a crowd of about 60 people.
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