Shoes not needed in marathon

Rick Roeber of Lee's Summit, Mo., won't be the first to run the Deseret Morning News Marathon without wearing shoes. At 50, he may not be the fastest.

He may not even be alone. There are several barefoot marathoners who live in Utah, and there's a whole national network of people who travel around to do it.

But Monday's Deseret Morning News race will be Roeber's 20th barefoot marathon — he did 18 shod marathons first — and by the time he hits the Parleys Canyon starting line, he'll have run around 6,300 shoeless miles.

Without gnarly feet.

"My feet, they look pretty much like everybody else's. They're not overly calloused. They're not real supple, but they're not incredibly tough like tough leather, either," said Roeber as he looked forward to his first trip to Salt Lake City.

With the encouragement of his barefoot-running inspiration, Barefoot Ken Bob Saxton of Southern California — who ran the 2004 Deseret Morning News Marathon with Barefoot Todd Byers, also of SoCal — Roeber expects to do fine Monday.

He said he will have to pay attention to his quadriceps muscles and Achilles tendons on the long downhill, but he doesn't worry about his feet.

Saxton said he enjoyed running alongside the parade in 2004 and being next to the mayor's car "for a short ways. He was going too slow, so I passed him," he said, remembering also that "the organizers were nice enough to have those small, plastic, kiddy pools filled with ice, which really felt good on the bare tootsies."

Roeber said after the first few shoeless miles of training, the feet do fine, and the rest of the body is happier than it's ever been while running, even healed by running barefoot. Knee problems magically disappear, said Roeber, speaking from personal experience.

"Basically barefoot running forces proper technique to where you don't overstride," he said. "You take shorter strides, quicker cadence, so you're landing underneath your torso. It will make you a better runner all-around just by strengthening those muscles that have atrophied by not using them as much."

Barefoot runners learn quickly to land first on the balls of their feet, rather than the heels, and Roeber said studies show that he lands with about half the impact than he does if he runs in shoes. "With shoes, you can basically run any goofy way you want to because you have all that padding. When you have to land lightly, then you do," he said.