Pete whilst i wouldnt suggest that speed is the only or even the primary cause of heel strike in recreational runners i wouldnt rule out that it could be a significant factor.

if you watch the video’s of the elite men and women you will see that during the flight phase their leading leg acting like a pendulum actually extends quite a long way past the vertical, then  the body and knee ‘catch up’ to bring the lower leg closer to the vertical as the footstrike occurs.

Take a recreational runner and the flight phase shortens up considerably, There is not sufficient time for the bodys mass to move far enough foward to bring the lower leg back into the vertical.

I cant help but suspect that the reduced ‘air time’ at the considerably slower speeds that recreational runners run at is playing a part in heel striking. I would imagine that the built up and cushioned heel exasberates and encourages this even more.

Some of us then turn to cadence control and deliberately fore-shortening our front leg swing to try and achieve a vertical lower leg at foot strike in heel raised shoes. so its possible to alter our form to correct it, but thats not necesarily the most obvious or ‘natural’ approach when your trying to eek out every scrap of speed you can.

Unfortunatly we will never be able to know what sort of foot strike a recreational runner from the pre-heel running shoe era used, the evidence just doesnt exist, but in time i fully expect that the growing minimalist runners will be able to supply us with the verifiable evidence we need.

I won’t deny that speed does have some role, as the literature does
suggest that mid foot/forefoot gets more common in faster runners. It
is a bit of a chicken or egg thing though – are they faster because
they mid foot, or are they mid foot because they are faster. I have
data on marathon runners, and found that speed is not a predictor of
foot strike type, which might be part of my bias here – I’ve focused
on the marathon. Certainly, as you get to shorter races and
dramatically faster speeds, things seem change.

Another wrinkle is that I have seen runners with no flight phase at
all, yet they are clearly not walking. When you film and watch enough
runners, so see all kinds of strange stuff!

I don’t know. But most of the casual shoes even back then had
constricting toe boxes and raised heels. So, even if they were racing
in very minimal shoes, most of them probably had feet adapted to shoes
similar to casual shoes of today.

You have to keep in mind that these elites are almost always wearing
racing flats, and recreational runners until recently rarely did.
Shoes are a confounding factor when it comes to associating foot
strike and speed.

I think this point goes against most of that which precedes and is the weakest statement in an otherwise very insightful and interesting article. The fact that almost all the elite athletes in these videos are running quickly and forefoot/midfoot striking and all the recreational runners running a lot slower are landing further/significantly further back, cannot be ignored.  I think the Tergat video especially supports my belief that form has a lot more to do with landing on the forefoot than the size of the heel and shoe.

But this is just conjecture aswell. A study combining both elites and non-elites in varying levels of shoe and surface running different speeds needs to be made to lend significant weight to those of us that believe running in more minimalist shoes is better.

Wow, to me he seems to be a slight heel striker in shoes.