I think anything is great if the person enjoys it and it works for them.
On the other hand, there is a tinge of an idea here - correct me if I'm wrong here, Keith - that there is something really wrong with running in regular running shoes ("'Natural gait is biomechanically impossible for any shoe-wearing person'"...). To that I respond with a friendly dose of skepticism. (Yeah I know, this is the thanks you get for taking those awesome pictures of me. ;))
All the evidence points to clothing and shoes having been an integral part of the human evolutionary Great Leap Forward that ushered in a full suite of modern human behaviors in our ancestors for the first time around 100,000 years ago, behaviors that also included things like art, ceremonial burial, inventiveness with tools, and language. Human body lice, which can only live in clothing being worn by a human, have been genetically traced as a divergent species from prior human head lice; the timing of their new adaptation to human clothing has been genetically timed to around 70,000 years ago, meaning human clothing must already have been widespread before then. The skeletal structures, and almost certainly also the muscle and tendon structures and skin, of the feet of our ancestors had already evolved in response to wearing shoes, by tens of thousands of years ago. For shoe-wearing to actually drive the evolution of the form of our feet, implies that wearing shoes had already been commonplace throughout the human race for at least thousands of years prior to that. Much more recently, the mummified European man Otzi, who lived 5,300 years ago in Italy, before any of the great pyramids were built in Egypt, was found wearing very sophisticated shoes, fitted for his foot size, and constructed of bear hide leather for the soles, deer hide leather for the top panels, netting made of bark, and padding made from grass. Humans have been wearing shoes for somewhere around 100,000 years, and we have multiplied our number a millionfold and spread from the Rift Valley in eastern Africa across the entire face of the Earth in those shoes.
My point being, running shoes are solidly a part of the human species' extended phenotype, and one that has long conveyed a great advantage and for which we are supremely adapted. If your rationale for eschewing them is that you just get a kick out of it, more power to you! If you're looking for deeper rationales in medicine or science, you should probably go back to the first rationale.
And ignoring all that, the more running mileage you churn through barefoot, the more you tempt the small but non-negligible risk of stepping on something horrible, which could do a lot more harm to your training schedule than any potential drawbacks of running in standard shoes.
And personally, I would feel very deprived and sad ever to run without my beautiful Vasques:
5 comments:
While you make several compelling and well crafted points, I have to take issue with the view that the modern running shoe is ultimately the best thing we can do for our feet because of the lineage of shoe-crafting before it.
Moccasins didn't have medial posts in them. The Tarahumara don't care much for gel cushioning. Many generations of human beings have run farther and faster in moccasins and crude tire sandals than I would imagine the entire running shoe wearing population ever have or will.
I think more than 'barefoot' what I and many of my new, open minded converts ;-) am after is a protective covering for the foot that doesn't impede on the way the foot was designed to operate.
I certainly don't want to be penetrated by anything "horrible" (but I also don't want the undue strain that running in an overpadded, overbuilt running shoe wreaks on your body) so I choose to rarely run totally barefoot and do the multitude of my mileage in what in my opinion, are a good start at protecting my feet.
I have yet to find a "running shoe" that simply protects without thinking it's "all that" and coming loaded with all kinds of hideous gee-gaws and padding on it that make your feet dumb.
No doubt that in the human quest to go farther, faster, longer we crafted clothing and footwear; but the most effective means of footwear was just protection. It wasn't springs, air, gel, torsion bars, 'wave technology,' treads, medial posts, arch supports or any of that horse puckey they sell you at the shoe store to supposedly keep you from being injured or so that you might be faster.
All of those materials in the shoes Otzi wore probably moved more effectively with his feet than the pair of Vasques I threw away last year because they felt like a pair of wooden planks strapped to my feet ;-)
What human beings probably understood 100,000 years ago and we as supposedly the most advanced society in the history of humanity seemingly fail to grasp is this: if we let our feet do what they are meant to do there will be no need to augment them because they will be strong and healthy (many studies have proven the benefits of walking and running without shoes on in moderate amounts for runners and fitness enthusiasts alike). In the process, one may also come to discover new and wonderful aspects of bipedal travel that may have escaped them when their feet were all trussed up in what amount to walking casts and finally dispel some of the fears and preconceptions about running with their feet, instead of their shoes.
On the shoe / no shoe topic, all I can say is, God Bless Vasque!
Phillip Gary Smith
(way to get into the racing series, Bryan!)
Bryan, you write "The skeletal structures, and almost certainly also the muscle and tendon structures and skin, of the feet of our ancestors had already evolved in response to wearing shoes, by tens of thousands of years ago."
Are you trying to say that wearing shoes has altered the genetic makeup of humans, and particularly our feet? Personally, I have a hard time buying the theory that wearing something will have an effect on my genetic makeup such that it would pass onto my offspring, and so on. Granted, you are talking about something happening over the course of millenia, but nonetheless, I strongly disagree.
Has the human foot evolved since the dawn of man? Undoubtably so. Has it been a result of shoes? I highly doubt it. Nonetheless, all of this debate is just theory and we'll probably never know the truth of it all. That being said, I have to side on the view that wearing anything that alters or prevents your body from moving the way it was designed to, in this case your feet, is not healthy. Do I wear shoes? Yes, because that's what I was "taught" to do and the available alternatives have been limited. However, I do walk around barefoot whenever possible and plan to slowly tranisition my running and walking to "barefoot" via Vibram's KSO's.
Phillip: Amen brother!
Steve: From the way you describe it ("the theory that wearing something will have an effect on my genetic makeup such that it would pass onto my offspring" etc.) what you disagree with is Lamarckism, you and all of modern science. The idea here though is variation and natural selection.
Thanks for sharing..! I can't run barefooted. Those running shoes are looks like my Adidas running shoes. I can't even walk without them.
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