  We study the free boundary problem for the "hard phase" material introduced
by Christodoulou, both for rods in (1+1)-dimensional Minkowski spacetime and
for spherically symmetric balls in (3+1)-dimensional Minkowski spacetime.
Unlike Christodoulou, we do not consider a "soft phase", and so we regard this
material as an elastic medium, capable of both compression and stretching. We
prove that shocks must be null hypersurfaces, and derive the conditions to be
satisfied at a free boundary. We solve the equations of motion of the rods
explicitly, and we prove existence of solutions to the equations of motion of
the spherically symmetric balls for an arbitrarily long (but finite) time,
given initial conditions sufficiently close to those for the relaxed ball at
rest. In both cases we find that the solutions contain shocks if and only if
the pressure or its time derivative do not vanish at the free boundary
initially. These shocks interact with the free boundary, causing it to lose
regularity.
