I agree that mat targeting is a problem. Even when I film myself without a mat it is hard not to adjust form when you know you need to land in a certain spot to be recorded by the camera.

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I’ve filmed out of a car window alongside a runner on the road, it was the best footage I’ve ever shot. I’ve thought about trying to attach a camera to a jogging stroller to run alongside the runner, might work well.
If you develop that drone, I’m happy to test it out :)

Sent from my iPad

I guess what you need is a moving camera that tracks the runner. A couple of ways I can think of doing this off the top of my head:

A) On smooth road use a vehicle/bike mounted camera.

B) Use a camera mounted on a rail.

C) Use a camera on a tripod that is a distance from the runner and tracks the runner by rotating on the vertical axis. The camera far enough away but zoomed in to get a useful recording. Possibly have the runner run on a circular track would make it possible to keep the running direction perpendicular to the camera direction.

D) Mount the camera on the runner

E) Use a remote/automatically controlled drone that flies alongside the runner.

Solution E would require some developing but once you had such a system it’d be pretty flexible.

Developing these systems are a whole research task in themselves :-)

John Foster

Indeed!

The Picture A looks like an over-stride to me and the since the foot is only just making it on to the mat we have the motivation for an over-stride as well. This runner might well over-stride and heel strike all the time, but I would suspect that it’s trying to land on the mat has skewed the results so inferring anything from this particular shot would be unsafe.

For this type of analysis I would look to have a mat that is comfortably longer then length of stride so that the participants can properly relax in the knowledge that they will hit the mat no matter what. Ideally one would record both feet landing on the mat.

Without this I view the data as much less valuable, and making any conclusions about even this population would be in-appropriate, let alone extrapolating it to populations.

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On a slightly different note, I have three children, one’s a forefoot striker, always has been and good chance she will always be – one thing she’s always often done is sprint at high speed in play, she just loves running fast and I suspect this has influenced her foot position on landing. My other two daughters vary between a mild heel strike and pronounced heel strike – except when where minimal shoes like flats/plimsoles when she yells out that her heels here then converts automatically to forefoot stide. The mid heel striker has done a fair amount of running, but takes it slow and steady, while my heel striking daughter doesn’t enjoy sports much so tends to avoid them. I mention this as it might correlate with a running population landing forefoot rather than a walking population that might be more likely to landing on the heel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…