Want Good Running Form?

Is a good stride a matter of many disparate elements coming together or one underlying virtue?

Running form is still a hot topic these days. Countless articles about running form have been printed and posted within the past couple of years, long threads on form keep appearing in online running forums, experts on running form are touring the country talking about it, whole books on running form have lately hit the presses, and running coaches all over the country are now teaching running form, whereas in the past they ignored it.
With all this communication going on, we must have a very clear idea of what good running form is, right? Not really. In fact, all of this communication about running form is going on precisely because we don’t yet have a clear idea of its proper definition. If we’d figured it out we would have fallen silent on the topic and moved on to another.
If you ask any given “expert” on running form what it is, you’ll likely get a response that consists of a laundry list of seemingly unrelated characteristics: a midfoot or forefoot footstrike, a slight forward lean, relaxed shoulders, eyes focused straight ahead, and so forth. To improve your running form, you must instill each of these characteristics in your stride. They will somehow add up to speed and efficiency.
Perhaps it’s the Plato in me, but intuition has always told me that, whatever it is, good running form must be a single thing, not a grab bag of things. And if you take a close look at the research on running form, you will find some pretty solid evidence that good running form may indeed be one single thing.