SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
The Once and Future Way to Run
from the New York Times
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When you're stalking barefoot
runners, camouflage helps. "Some of
them get kind of prancy when they
notice you filming," Peter Larson
says. "They put on this notion of
what they think barefoot running
should be. It looks weird." Larson,
an evolutionary biologist at Saint
Anselm College in New Hampshire who
has been on the barefoot beat for
two years now, is also a stickler
about his timing. "You don't want
to catch them too early in a run,
when they're cold, or too late,
when they're tired."
If everything comes together
just right, you'll be exactly where
Larson was one Sunday morning in
September: peeking out from behind
a tree on Governors Island in New
York Harbor, his digital video
camera nearly invisible on an
ankle-high tripod, as the Second
Annual New York City Barefoot Run
got under way about a quarter-mile
up the road. Hundreds of
runners--men and women, young and
old, athletic and not so much so,
natives from 11 different
countries--came pattering down the
asphalt straight toward his
viewfinder.... Larson
surreptitiously recorded them all,
wondering how many (if any) had
what he was looking for: the lost
secret of perfect running.
It's what Alberto Salazar, for a
while the world's dominant
marathoner and now the coach of
some of America's top distance
runners, describes in
mythical-questing terms as the "one
best way"--not the fastest,
necessarily, but the best: an
injury-proof, evolution-tested way
to place one foot on the ground and
pick it up before the other comes
down. Left, right, repeat; that's
all running really is, a movement
so natural that babies learn it the
first time they rise to their feet.
Yet sometime between childhood and
adulthood--and between the dawn of
our species and today--most of us
lose the knack.
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