[glenngillen]

Same experience here (though I probably skewed more to barefoot than you did). There's a certain amount of immediate painful feedback for a heel striker once you start running barefoot. There's a certain amount of reconditioning and retraining of under utilised muscles that needs to happen so I think your advice to gradually introduce is make a lot of sense. What I've always found interesting is that even for runners like me that had poor form, as soon as the shoes come off we naturally shift towards a more efficient and lower impact technique.

After a few years of regular barefoot running my running gait had changed enough that I didn't feel the need to keep doing it and have been doing runs in race shoes almost exclusively for the past decade.