In the 90’s I worked as a personal trainer and gym instructor for about 8 years which gave me a lot of knowledge about fitness, nutrition and similar topics. I changed my career which took me away from fitness and into a desk chair until 2008. In that time I gained about 80 pounds.
Now I have been running off and on for about 25 years and I have only owned 2 pairs of running shoes. A lot of that time running was done barefoot on the beach. I would constantly change up my running surface from the soft sand to the hardpack sand to the shallow water. It always felt great, but I never tried doing the barefoot thing on the asphalt. All that time I had the sneaking suspicion that the marketing hype and rhetoric we are fed by the traditional running community that a good running shoe is necessary to avoid or minimize injury, was bullshit.
I finally made the solid decision to get off my ass and get back to where I was 15 years earlier and lose the 80 pounds I had gained. Now I’ve always had a sort of love/hate relationship with running. I’m sure many of you can understand this. Sometimes it just feels right and other days it just feels like a chore. The pain I deal with is in the hips and knees, but they were always manageable and for the most part I accepted them as something I couldn’t change. At some point in 2009 I saw an interview with Christopher McDougall who wrote a book called “Born to Run“. For those unfamiliar with this book, ‘Born to Run’ explores the life and running habits of the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico’s Copper Canyon, arguably the greatest distance runners in the world. And these indians run ridiculous distances of 50-100+ miles across crazy rough and steep terrains in nothing but strap on sandals.
Digging deeper and really scouring the web for more information on barefoot running, I came across Barefoot Ted and the Vibram Five Finger shoes. I kept reading more and more until I had a strong understanding of what was going on and what I needed to do. If you haven’t seen Barefoot Ted‘s blog I highly recommend it for a wealth of information on the topic.
I first decided I needed to change the way I run, but I did it with my shoes on. I needed to stop heel striking or heel ‘rolling’ as some call it and start landing on my forefoot. Knowing what I did about kinesiology and biomechanics it slowly became clear to me how the foot was really supposed to be operating when running. OF COURSE!! The heel was never meant to be used as a striking implement. The more I looked at it and studied it I realized the heel is basically used for 2 things; balance and stability. When the foot and leg that are in the air, they need to be relaxed. After my first run doing this my calves were very sore. This was as it should be. By design, my calves got very strong, very fast. Look at the way a sprinter runs. They never touch their heels to the ground. Sprinter shoes don’t even have heel tread in most cases and the spikes are all in the forefoot.
So for about 6 months I did all my running very consciously striking on forefoot. It felt amazing! I could run clearly faster and farther with almost no pain that I had from heel strike running. And it was much more effortless. It just felt natural. I was increasing my distances from 3-4 miles to 8-10 miles.
Much more recently I finally decided it was time to make the full switch over to the VFF shoe and see what it felt like. I kept my distance to a short 2 miles to see what the physical effect would be. My reaction was like a kid on christmas morning. Wow did this feel amazing. It was like going from driving a loud, old, beat up VW, to driving a fast, sleek, silent european sports car. After that first run in the VFF I knew I would never put on my old running shoes again. My calves found a new level of soreness, but I loved it and knew it was only a matter of time before they were strong enough for me to go much longer distances. And the greatest thing was that my heel had plenty of room to operate when I was landing without hitting the ground. All that extra padding in the heel of my old running shoes was encouraging very poor running form which gave me all sorts of problems. TERRIBLE! The good news is that all those problems are gone. My longest distance currently is 12 miles and my left foot hurt pretty bad at the end, but only because I sprained my foot 6 months earlier. There is no way I could have done 12 miles in shoes.
I have lost those 80 lbs and I love sneering at large footwear companies and I love even more getting in conversations with runners who still wear foot coffins and introducing them to the quiet, peaceful panacea that is barefoot running. Many more companies are coming out with minimalist “barefoot” style shoes as more people get wise to the misinformation we have all accepted for so long about running shoes.
