My 6 year-old son and I spent part of the afternoon today running barefoot laps up and down the driveway in front of a camera. I was trying to get some higher quality stills of my barefoot foostrike by using the motion triggering feature on the Casio EX-F1, and he decided he wanted to join in.

Toward the end of our little experiment, I suggested we try running "fast" by the camera, one behind the other. His reply went something along the lines of "When I go fast I like to get up on my toes!" Smart kid. Anyway, the picture below is of our footstrikes, shot one after the other, less than a few seconds apart. Like father, like son on the barefoot forefoot strike I'd say!

 

I was happy to see that I landed on my forefoot in almost every pass, with a few midfoot strikes mixed in (my son actually seems to transition frequently between midfoot and forefoot landings when running barefoot). No heel-striking whatsoever, which is certainly not always the case when I'm wearing shoes! Below is a video fused together from a series of about 30 high-resolution still images, as well as a few more high res pictures of my barefoot footstrike.



Same video as above in higher quality from Vimeo.


Barefoot Running: Forefoot Strike in Slow Motion from Runblogger on Vimeo.
Frame by frame view of my forefoot strike while running barefoot on an asphalt driveway. Filmed at 60 fps on a Casio Exilim EX-F1 digital camera.