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.

This is a response by Christopher McDougall to a New York Time article titled, “Is Running Barefoot Better For You?” from 2009. It was so well stated that I felt it deserved a blog post of its own. Here it is:

Wait — why isn’t the question “Is Running in Shoes Better for You?”? Since when did motion-controlling shoes become the default position for the human foot? It’s bizarre, and I guess admirable in a perverse, market-manipulating, sucker-born-every-minute way, that motion-controlling shoes are considered natural and bare feet are seen as some kind of thrill-seeking experiment. Since when did an artificial contrivance with absolutely zero scientific evidence to recommend them become the default position? The burden of proof isn’t on the human foot — which had been doing fantastically well on its own for 2 million years, thank you very much. It’s on these overpriced, overengineered novelty items which have done nothing to decrease the injury rate in 40 years.

— christopher mcdougall

I think this speaks brilliantly to just how easily our culture is manipulated by corporations.

Check out the new Merrell web site. They are really on board with the barefoot movement. They have an entire section for nothing but barefoot products. I guess it’s just a matter of time before all the companies out there do what they can to get their share of the pie on this one. It should be easy for them to deflect questions about why they would support running barefoot when they claim to sell products designed to reduce or eliminate injury yet provide no research to back it up. The irony will probably escape most.

So I ran 12 miles today. This is a record for me. And I ran the entire distance in Vibram Five Fingers shoes. If you aren’t familiar with these, they are basically a shoe that is designed to simulate the feeling of barefoot running by giving the soles of your feet a thin layer of protection from all the little nasties on the road that may play havoc with the tender undersides of your foot. They are similar to reef or water type shoes and they have individual pockets for each of your five toes. When you walk around in them you feel like a ninja. Now to most runners, 12 miles isn’t a huge distance… until they try doing it un-shod. Most marathon runners would be whimpering after only a few miles if they tried doing it barefoot. Most runners in general have no idea just how weak their feet, ankles and lower legs really are. This is the result of carrying your feet in soft pillowy high heel foot coffins mile after mile which encourages poor running form and gives your feet nothing to work with in order to make them stronger.