When I finished my first half-marathon (with a time of 1:58:22), I experienced a stress fracture in my right foot.
For the next 2 years or so, I was plagued by various running injuries. I had knee pain in my right knee, which caused me to cut way back on mileage. I even went to go get an MRI and was told that I had chondromalacia patella and would need to take it easy and buy supportive shoes while I strengthened up my quads to prevent surgery. Shortly after getting over the knee pain, I started to get pain in my foot and heel. It turns out, I also developed plantar fasciitis in my right foot, and soon my left. So, I did what most runners do. I stretched my feet. I rolled them out. I ate a fist-full of ibuprofen before I went out for a run, and usually cut my run short when the pain became unbearable. That's when I decided something had to change. I wanted to find a way to keep running...and to enjoy it! I didn't want to be one of those people who cried a little inside when my alarm went off for my morning run. So, at the tail end of 2021, I began looking into running technique, footwear, and training programs to prevent running injuries. I came across minimalist and barefoot shoes. I dove into the clinical research, reading countless articles from peer-reviewed journals covering studies and experiments aimed at understanding how our choice of footwear affects running performance and injury rates. That search led me to realize that, it's not so much the barefoot shoes themselves that are the important part of the equation. The important factor is our running style; how we run. Our legs and feet work best when they're moved in a certain way. And that way of running is actually not the way most of us run. What is contained in the following chapters is an exploration of what I call "Natural Running". We explore how footwear affects running posture and performance, why the way most of us run is wrong, and how to change our stride pattern to capitalize on our natural strengths coming from our anatomy to run longer, faster, and without injuries.
