[pmahoney]

I'd love to read citations for this; this is a topic of interest to me. I ran barefoot for several years (on pavement and grass; stopped because occasional thorn or glass became too obnoxious) and read various peer-reviewed running injury studies, and never found anything correlating with higher injury rates other than history of past injuries and doing "too much, too soon".

[mlyle]

Lower extremity alignment and risk of overuse injuries in runners, Wen 1997 found a significantly decreased risk of injury with less mileage on pavement. There's no ability to see the temporal relationship here, though-- people with higher reported injuries reported running more on pavement, but causation could even be in the opposite direction.

Predicting lower-extremity injuries among habitual runners, Macera 1989 found an increased risk of severe injury running on concrete... for female runners only.

There's a few more studies "for" and a few studies "against", so I'd say the evidence is decidedly mixed. But there's at least some cause to believe that hard surfaces could be worse.

As far as minor complaints, though, who knows. I strongly believe that I feel worse after running (with athletic shoes) on concrete than softer surfaces like dirt path, etc.

Another thing which could be related: there's strong evidence that terrain can be too flat/uniform and resultant repetitive stress effects screw people up. A degenerate case of this is treadmill running.

[ghthor]

My first 24hr race was on an asphalt track. It was my first so it was harder because of that, but it also strained my legs a lot more then my 2nd 24hr race which was on a dirt&grass track.

[Ma8ee]

Aren’t those studies about running with shoes. And the discussion was about running barefoot on pavement.

[mlyle]

You're not going to find enough high quality studies about running barefoot on pavement. This is the data we have.

[Ma8ee]

One of the arguments often repeated for barefoot running is that modern shoes make it possible to run with bad techique, which increases injuries, in particular on hard ground. Running barefot with bad technique is too obviously uncomfortable from the start. This means that using studies about shoed running as an argument that barefoot running on pavement is bad for you is rather useless.

[kbenson]

Well, the caption of the first image in the article is:

For the Oklahoma City Memorial Half Marathon, Ramírez and her brother told KFOR-TV they wore "sneakers for this race because they knew the pavement would be hard on their feet and knees."

So, there's a marathon winning runner corroborating, which is something.