Really, the best thing you can do is go to a good running store and let the expert watch how you run, and listen to his/her advice.
If you want my opinion as a longterm pavement runner, who’s been reading every article in Runner’s World for the last five years, and would like to think he’s been some help dispensing advice on running, than take this for what it’s worth.
Shoes make you run badly, and they give you an unnatural stride that puts a lot of stress on your body and can give you all kinds of injuries.
The shoe enables land on your heel, which is not something you’d be able to do, barefoot in the wild, where your physiology evolved.
Try it sometime, and you’ll understand what I mean the first time you slam your heel down on a pebble.
With shoes on pavement, when you run and land on your heel, you slam hard and transmit that force up into your ankle, shins, and knee-joints. By using your heel as landing gear you are turning it into a shock transmitter. What it evolved to be is a shock absorber.
Let’s go back to that barefoot runner in the woods. He can’t land on his heel without injury and great pain the first time he steps on a pebble or a stick. The underside, or arch of the foot is also extremely sensitive.
How then to run?
Well, your indigenous hunter/gather types tend to do it the same way as you would after spending an afternoon barefoot in the woods. Try it, and you’ll discover the stride pretty easily. You are born to it.
It goes like this.
The foot you are going to lan on actually points to the ground where it will land. You touch softly with the outside part of the ball of your foot (behind your little toe,) and roll inward toward the ball of your foot (behind the big tow.) It’s a pretty subtle roll and you won’t really notice you’re rolling. Just notice that the outside ball of your foot touches first and gradually contact is made towards the inside.
As full contact is made more and more weight is placed on the ball of the foot. You aren’t slamming down your foot, so much as placing it and testing the ground. Your heel acts as a shock absorber as you come down off the ball of your foot, but doesn’t bear significant weight.
It’s a very low impact and natural way to run. Once you understand it barefoot, it’s pretty easy to modify and implement for shoes.
Try it out, and you’ll see. It’ll make running on the pavement a lot easier. Watch the elite runners on tv during marathons and you’ll see they run like this. It’s what creates the soft “glide” that they are often credited with.