Barefoot Running Step By Step: Book Review and Giveaway

Before today’s barefoot-related post and giveaway, a barefoot-related announcement: earlier this year, VIVOBAREFOOT offered a workshop in New York City with barefoot running expert Lee Saxby. The multi-day event provided practical and theoretical components of barefoot running, and participants earned certification to join a growing network of barefoot coaches.

If this sounds like your sort of thing, the company is offering the workshop again, this time a little further west. The next session is October 26-30 in Denver, CO, and will again feature Lee Saxby and the same curriculum as the New York course. The cost is fairly steep ($3000), but if you’re passionate about barefoot running and looking to develop or enhance your personal training resume to share the benefits of barefooting as a career move, this might be an investment worth making. Check out the VIVOBAREFOOT Training Clinic website for details.

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Of course, another way to enhance your knowledge on a particular subject is to do a lot of reading - and when the topic is barefoot running, there are more and more options out there to choose from. One of the most noteworthy offerings comes from another well-known guru, Barefoot Ken Bob Saxton, whose new book Barefoot Running Step by Step is coauthored by Los Angeles Times fitness columnist Roy Wallack.

In the interest of disclosure, I should say that I was interviewed to contribute to this book, and ended up on the cutting room floor (or, in digital parlance, in the recycle bin of the writer’s hard drive.) Roy Wallack contacted me through this website, and we had a long phone conversation about my rationale for taking up barefoot running and whether I was going to stick with barefoot running for life. (This was shortly after I had published my multi-part Barefoot Files series, which is still available for reading on my right sidebar).

I’m not particularly upset about being left out of the book – in fact, now that I’ve read it, my exclusion makes a lot of sense. As I’ve described before, I don’t have a particularly dramatic back story about becoming a barefoot runner; it was just something I had thought about for a while, and one day finally decided to try it. And after an extended, generally successful progression to barefoot running, I ultimately decided that my long-term preference would be to use minimalist footwear for my ongoing exploits in ultrarunning. As it turns out, those factors made me something of an oddball among everyone else featured in the book.

Barefoot bliss, Summer 2010

That’s not to say I disliked the finished product, however. More than anything, Barefoot Running Step By Step is a comprehensive instruction manual for anybody interested in becoming a barefoot runner. It draws heavily from Barefoot Ken Bob’s website, which for many years was the only Internet outpost to provide any instruction or support for barefoot runners. (And honestly, I always found the website quite cumbersome to navigate, so having all the important information in one collection is quite refreshing.) Ken Bob was one of the earliest advocates of barefoot running - his website started in 1997, which is a relative epoch in the timeframe of the modern barefoot movement - and over the course of several years has certainly became the most prominent. He has taught workshops to barefoot runners all over the world, been featured in hundreds of magazine profiles, and has been an easily recognizable fixture at countless road races for the past two decades.

Barefoot Ken Bob; photo from BarefootKenBob.com

By all accounts, Barefoot Ken Bob is a force of personality, and that spirit is apparent throughout his book, which is filled with humor and strange observations and insightful “Barefoot Ken Bob-isms” developed over many years of experimenting and refining his technique. Several chapters are chock full of helpful advice on proper barefoot form, and the book has extensive color photographs to better visualize the concepts involved. If you’re starting your barefoot endeavors from scratch, this book is an ideal tool to walk you through the process.

Among the material in the final chapters are multiple profiles of barefoot runners, from the famous (Abebe Bikila, Zola Budd) to back of the pack amateurs, all of whom have compelling stories to tell about the benefits of going shoeless. I was impressed to see that one story actually included a runner who had a miserable experience on a gravel path during a race; it echoed my own frustrations with running on gravel fire roads, which in turn influenced my preference for minimalist footwear.

That leads to the main criticism I have of Ken Bob’s book: he’s very dismissive of minimalist footwear, Vibrams in particular. The rationale is that your sensory feedback isn’t as good as when you’re barefoot – but the authors also make the claim that because of this, you’re more likely to get injured wearing Vibrams than you are by running purely barefoot. I happen to disagree with this point; it’s well-established that plenty of new barefoot runners develop injuries, and I believe the benefits you gain from a bit of protection outweigh the sensory advantage of having naked feet. In my opinion, successful progression hinges more on patience and proper form than on sensation or protection.

Aside from that point of contention, Barefoot Running Step By Step is a very thorough overview of the why and the how of barefoot running. It would be a valuable tool for novices, and I’m confident that even experienced barefoot runners would find some useful pointers. It’s unlikely that many of us have been at this longer than Barefoot Ken Bob, and it’s never a bad idea to seek the advice of our forerunners when trying to improve our own experience.

Barefoot Running Step By Step retails for $15 from Amazon.com and is also available for $10 on Amazon's Kindle. Also, in conjunction with this review, the book’s publisher has generously agreed to ship one copy directly to a winner selected from this post. Leave a comment below to enter, and I’ll announce the winner on September 17th. Good luck to everyone!


*Product provided by Fair Winds Press
**See other book and product reviews on sidebar at right. If you have a product you’d like reviewed, contact me at info@runningandrambling.com.




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