I don't know how I missed that. I've been tuning into your blog regularly for 6-9 months now. No use reinventing the wheel, but it's nice to have independent confirmation of one's experiences/intuitions I suppose, especially since I've coached a total of zero runners.When we were meeting with Merrell to decide how to teach better form, we decided to distill it down to the most basic elements. Basically we came to the same conclusion BL is coming to: running form is complicated, there's a lot of individual differences, and the easiest way to teach is to give a few general cues and let people discover their own "best form."
The result? The ABC's of Bareform.
A= Athletic posture,
B= Balanced foot landing, referring to foot position relative to the body (foot under knee) and how the foot lands on the ground (pancake flat),
C= Cadence. This one really just reiterates the first part of "B", but provides another objective cue to prevent excessive overstriding. We use 180 as a starting point, then explain the peak metabolic efficiency thing.
We've had A LOT of success using the method. It's easy to understand, easy to implement, and easy to share with others.
One question, do you only teach C for over-striders? Or do you think it's a good cue for beginners no matter what, even if A & B are looking good? My sense is to start out with AB only, and then see if C is necessary, as I think I remarked above somewhere.