As Zola Budd Pieterse headed out along the Boulder Creek Path on a group run earlier this month, she looked much the same as she did in that most famous -- or infamous -- of races in Olympic track history.

She is still lean, fit, and light and easy on her feet, just as she was during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic 3,000 meter final. It was a race that saw her potential golden moment turn to disaster.

Budd was in Boulder at the invitation of Newton Running to be part of the local shoe company's symposium on "Natural Running." She was an apt choice, as she was a natural runner -- training, racing and living barefoot -- long before Chris McDougall's "Born to Run" made the topic mainstream, and companies such as Newton, Terra Plana and Vibram began riding the wave.