If you see people walking around town with a strange flat-footed gait, they are probably converts to “chi walking.” Paul Tinkerhess, owner of Fourth Ave Birkenstock, is an evangelist of this form of locomotion, distantly related to tai chi, where you walk “not from heel to toe, but from the middle of your foot.”

After walking comes running. In September, Tinkerhess and friend Mike Lachance helped Canadian guru Dick Felton teach a workshop in chi running at Wheeler Park. Eight people, including Zach Ornelas, the winner of last year’s Detroit marathon, paid $195 for the all-day workshop. Ornelas has been battling an injury since that win and is exploring this supposedly more natural, low-impact approach.

Lachance gives the thirty-second elevator pitch on the technique, developed in 1999 by a North Carolina running coach. Regular walking and running involves hoisting your body on the toes of one foot and smashing down on the heel of another. The chi way: stand on two feet then lean forward and catch yourself on one foot with the weight distributed more evenly across the foot and repeat.

“That’s all there is to it,” Lachance says. “Everything else is just, ‘what do you do with your arms and with your mind?'”