Article: Sensing ground, as a lifestyle: A review of Barefoot Running by Michael Sandler and Jessic

[Smelph]

Great review Abide! I agree with pretty much everything you had to say.

When first started running barefoot this was he only book I could easily get my hands on (gazelle sports carried it - it was so new the runbare website barely had anything on it!). I read it cover to cover and then frequently came back for specific sections as issues came up or if I felt I needed a refresher on a thing or two. All in all it's been a very valuable resource for me, and now that my personal library also includes jason and Ken bob's books the three together make a great collection of barefoot wisdom!

My only gripe was the crunchy aspect, as I have little use for ideas like meditation and grounding (I've never gotten anything like this to work for me) and prefer cold hard science. Fortunately as you said, those things can be avoided fairly easily.

Again, great take on the book!

 

[dug deep]

I saw Michael and Jessica talk at In-Step in Boulder (barefoot friendly running shop) about a year ago. Of course I picked up a signed copy of the book as well. I found the writing better than the editing...the chapters are well written and there is clever advice throughout, but the same advice is in the body of text, in sidebars and in summaries.

After the first few chapters the redundacies seemed to level out, or I began to ignore them...not sure which, but the reading got easier.

I found the book to be an excellent source of info on how to run in general. Like Abide, I don't exactly agree with everything (chicken arms cut off circulation to my hands), but there is reasoning behind everything in the book and I found myself learning a lot about running even though I've been doing it a while. Worth the read, for sure.