Today I ran 3 miles barefoot around the Smith Fieldhouse indoor track. There has been a lot of hoopla online and within the running community lately debating shoes vs. barefoot, footstrikes, etc. There was even an article in Nature recently about a footstrike study. Barefooters say it is more natural and that shoes mess up your form and footstrike, actually increasing impact forces and leading to injuries and stuff. Shoers say that they protect your feet and help cushion impacts to reduce impact forces and injuries. I say I don't really know one way or another. Most of the scientific studies are biased (funded by shoe companies, ulterior motives, small sample sizes of biased parts of the population...) and so far I haven't seen convincing evidence from a peer reviewed legitimate study that favors one side or another. As for my experience, I have noticed that altering my footstrike to a midfoot/forefoot landing seems to alleviate lateral knee pain (ITBS), and that it doesn't matter whether I have shoes or not. This is just my experiment of one. I ran barefoot today for 2 reasons: wanted to try it out, forgot my running shoes at home. It was fun, and I think I will do it again, but I still feel like shoes are a good idea esp. for outside conditions.
Jacob
