Barefoot Running Step by Step: Barefoot Ken Bob, the Guru of Shoeless Running, Shares His Personal Technique for Running with More Speed, Less Impact, Fewer Injuries and More Fun PDF
Preview Barefoot Running Step by Step: Barefoot Ken Bob, the Guru of Shoeless Running, Shares His Personal Technique for Running with More Speed, Less Impact, Fewer Injuries and More Fun
Dedicated to the tens of thousands of visitors and contributors to The Running Barefoot website and forum, all of whom helped write this book. BAREFOOT RUNNING STEP BY STEP BAREFOOT KEN BOB, THE GURU OF SHOELESS RUNNING, SHARES HIS PERSONAL TECHNIQUE FOR RUNNING WITH MORE SPEED, LESS IMPACT, FEWER LEG INJURIES, AND MORE FUN BAREFOOT KEN BOB SAXTON THE LEADING INSTRUCTOR OF BAREFOOT RUNNING FEATURED IN RUNNER’S WORLD, THE NEW YORK TIMES, AND THE BESTSELLER BORN TO RUN ROY M. WALLACK LOS ANGELES TIMES FITNESS COLUMNIST AND AUTHOR OF RUN FOR LIFE AND BE A BETTER RUNNER CONTENTS PREFACE: THE JOURNEY INTRODUCTION: WHY YOU NEED TO LEARN HOW TO RUN BAREFOOT SECTION I TAKING FEET AND BODY BACK TO NATURE 1 BORN TO RUN BAREFOOT: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BAREFOOT KEN BOB 2 THE “FEETBACK” LOOP: LOSE YOUR SHOES TO GAIN NATURAL SENSORY FEEDBACK SECTION II TAKING FEET AND BODY BACK TO NATURE 3 THE BAREFOOT TECHNIQUE AND DRILLS THE BAREFOOT TECHNIQUE: FROM HEAD TO TOE 4 BAREFOOT PLAY: IMPROVE YOUR TECHNIQUE, REDUCE INJURIES, RUN EASY, AND HAVE FUN 5 BEWARE OF BAREFOOT RUNNING EXUBERANCE SYNDROME: TOO MUCH TOO SOON CAN DERAIL YOUR PROGRESS 6 VIBRAMS AND OTHER HALFWAY SOLUTIONS: WHY YOU STILL NEED TO LEARN BAREFOOTING FIRST SECTION III WHY BAREFOOTING WILL MAKE YOU FASTER 7 FAST TIMES IN NEBRASKA: HOW BAREFOOTING TURBOCHARGES YOU FOR RACING 8 MORE THAN BIKILA: PROFILES OF THE GREAT UNSHOD SECTION IV REAL-WORLD BAREFOOTING 9 THE BAREFOOT RACING LIFE: RUNNERS TELL IT LIKE IT IS 10 IS BAREFOOTING A FAD?: OR IS IT THE NEW DIRECTION OF RUNNING? ABOUT THE AUTHORS PREFACE THE JOURNEY In February 2004, while writing a Runner’s World story about the Pose method, an impact-reducing running technique then popular among triathletes but relatively unknown to the running community, I googled the words that it reminded me of: barefoot running. The next day, I was on the bike path at Bolsa Chica beach, running barefoot for three miles (4.8 km) alongside the first reference that had come up on my computer screen: Ken Saxton, one of the most unique, friendly, funny, and influential characters I have run across in two decades of writing about sports and fitness. What happened to me that day isn’t unique. Mention “barefoot running” to anyone familiar with it, and chances are that one of their first—and often the first—exposures to it comes through the man I learned later was known as Barefoot Ken Bob. (It’s a long story, but christened Kenneth Robert, he was called Bobby by his family and Ken at school. When he was 17, someone who heard both fused the two. “Barefoot” was added in the early 2000s, the practice of all the early barefooters). Forget six degrees of separation. For many, as you’ll see in the stories told throughout this book, it’s one degree: search “barefoot running,” get Ken Bob’s website, and start running barefoot. All barefoot running roads, at least until Christopher McDougall’s Born To Run tsunami hit in mid-2009, seem to lead directly through Ken Bob. McDougall’s barefooting is, in fact, a second degree of separation, as he learned about it from one of the far-out characters who people his book, Barefoot Ted McDonald, who discovered barefoot running on Ken’s website in 2003. From page 156 of Born to Run: “Ted stumbled across an international community of barefoot runners, complete with their own ancient wisdom and tribal nicknames and led by their great bearded sage, Barefoot Ken Bob Saxton.” Ken is known far and wide as the “guru,” but I like to think of him as the “go-to” guy—the bottomless-pit resource that I always go to first for information about running barefoot. I wrote about Ken and running barefoot in 2005 in Men’s Journal and later in stories in the L.A. Times and my 2009 book, Run for Life, discovering along the way that barefoot drills, warm-ups, and cool-downs had been used for decades by Olympic coaches such as Brooks Johnson and Joe Vigil to strengthen, protect, and speed up all kinds of top-level runners, from sprinters to middle distance runners to marathoners. (Incidentally, given that fact, we devoted significant real estate here to the performance-enhancing effect of running barefoot, something we think may come as a revelation to most runners, who only are aware of its well-known injury-stopping and happiness-inducing benefits.) Of course, I was far from the first to write about Ken. First as a novelty act and then as a trendsetter, he appeared in dozens of magazine and newspaper articles through the decade, including a number in Runner’s World. Seeing first- hand Ken’s deep knowledge and curiosity, his messianic commitment to spreading the word, and his patient, pleasant, and funny ability to explain it, it was natural that I go to him again when I was offered a chance to write a barefoot book in the spring of 2010. The timing was perfect in several ways. Not only had barefooting gone crazy in the year since Born to Run hit the shelves, but Ken was about to embark on a grand tour two-month around the country, with numerous workshops and planned visits with barefoot luminaries such as McDougall, Dr. Irene Davis, and Dr. Daniel Lieberman. It was a unique opportunity to get real-time feedback about the state of barefooting in the county, much in the same way that running barefoot gives you real-time feedback from the ground. Therefore, our strategy: Talk every day. No matter we each were in June and July (at times, I was in Oregon and Iceland; he was everywhere from New Orleans to Dallas to New York to Michigan to Nebraska to Colorado), I called or emailed Ken to ask how his workshops went, what he learned, and about any unusual people he met or stories he’d heard. I felt like his mother, and soon, his psychoanalyst. The trip was a metamorphosis of sorts for Ken; with far more people interested in running barefoot than he’d ever seen before, he had to raise his game, think about how to explain things better, faster, more thoroughly. In addition, staying with local hosts who were barefoot enthusiasts, there was a great opportunity to get other points of view. Often, I would call Ken up and he’d be tired or have little to say—and would hand the phone over to someone with interesting revelations to share and/or a great story to tell. Yes, Ken is the guru. But even he hasn’t thought of everything about running barefoot. We got a lot of great of ideas and angles from dozens of other barefooters you’ll read about in these pages—most of them, of course, who were first exposed to barefooting through him. By the time Barefoot Ken Bob’s 2010 Summer Tour ended in mid-July, I had notes filling a couple dozen yellow legal pads piled a foot high. Then I metaphorically went back to college, interviewing many academic researchers and digging through the rapidly growing body of published university studies that detail the biomechanics of running, the reduced impact forces of the barefoot landing, and the intricately complex function of things like the mechanoreceptors on the sole of the foot. For this old Political Science– Economics major, it was like cramming for a test in Physiology, Kinesiology, and Evolutionary Biology. All this is why I think that this book will stand out among the growing number of barefoot running resources. It combines the wisdom of the best barefoot mind out there—Barefoot Ken Bob’s—with the ideas of other dedicated barefooters and some of the world’s most cutting-edge researchers. In addition, we tapped the power of Ken’s website, a vast library of news stories and catalogued emails, and put out the word to his readers that we wanted interesting, insightful stories for the book. We were inundated. Although you could pretty much sum up the “rules” of running barefoot in a magazine article or page or two (which we do early in chapter 3), really driving the points home required capturing the vast experiences of Ken and dozens more barefooters, each of whom has their own unique take on it. By the end of the book, if all goes as planned, you will have gotten your barefoot lessons in so many interesting, creative, and funny ways that you simply won’t be able to forget them.
The list of books you might like
