""Most people today think barefoot running is dangerous and hurts," Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, said in a prepared statement. "But actually you can run barefoot on the world's hardest surfaces without the slightest discomfort and pain…It might be less injurious than the way some people run in shoes."
Lieberman and his group used 3-D infrared tracking to record and study the running and strike style of three groups of runners: people who had always run barefoot, people who had always run with shoes, and people who had switched from shoe to shoeless.
They found that when runners lace up their shmancy sneakers and take off, about 75 to 80 percent land heel-first. Barefoot runners—as Homo sapiens had evolved to be—usually land toward the middle or front of the food. "People who don't wear shoes when they run have an astonishingly different strike," Lieberman said. "
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=running-barefoot-is-better-research-2010-01-27
Even better than the short article is the video in which they teach you how to run down a gazelle on the African savanna - I have to try that one of these days ...
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