barefoot in the world

I resisted reading Christopher McDougall’s Born To Run. I’d been wearing minimal footwear and reading about living, walking, and running barefoot or in minimalist shoes for over a year. Then along comes this book (and accompanying media blitz) and suddenly everybody’s like, “Hey, regular shoes are BAD! People run BAREFOOT or in these crazy TOE SHOES! Isn’t that CRAZY?” It reminds me of my first college roommate, Sam, who’d seen No Doubt when they were a scrappy local band and couldn’t like them once they hit it big. (Random aside: When I got the letter from my college telling me my roommate’s name and phone number, I immediately decided he was black. I had this whole image in my head of my black roommate and his family. Not sure where that came from, especially considering he was from Orange County, but the blond surfer dude he turned out to be was a far cry from my imagination’s original version of him). But unlike Sam, who refused to play Tragic Kingdom in our room, I played hard to get with Born To Run for a while, but finally gave in and read it.

Know what? It’s really good. It’s exciting, engaging, well researched, well written. It’s nonfiction and packed with a lot of science and other information, but it’s also a really good story. The descriptions of the ultra races, 50–100+ mile footraces through some amazing and rather inhospitable locales, and the freaks people who run them are gripping stories of human endurance, competition, and community. Discussions with evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, physiologists, and a bunch of other -ologists paint a fascinating picture of how, as humans, we evolved to be runners. While not a book about barefoot running, it does suggest the elaborate footwear we’ve been sold as necessary to run (by the massive marketing machines of the athletic shoe companies who make them) and the bad form they encourage may be part of why so many runners are constantly getting hurt.

One of the runners featured in the book is Barefoot Ted. An ultra runner and running coach who runs barefoot or in Vibram Fivefingers, he’s portrayed as a bit of a spaz who never shuts up. This both gets him into trouble and ultimately endears him to the other runners in the book. After spending a couple hours with him the other day, I can fairly say his depiction in the book seems a bit of an exaggeration, but only a bit. He’s very energetic, and he does talk a lot. I found him interesting and charming, but I could see how he could wear you out, especially if you were a reclusive hermit type living among the native Tarahumara in the Copper Canyon in Mexico.

I met Ted for one of his coaching clinics — Introduction to Barefoot Running. Along with about 16 other people, I stood, walked, ran, and jumped around the streets of Santa Monica near Palisades Park on a Friday morning. I’ve been running barefoot before, and gotten a few looks. When you’re standing in a crowd of almost 20 people, all naked from the ankles down, people notice. Most just sort of looked over and listen as they passed to whatever Ted was sharing at the moment about technique, history of running, etc, but a few couldn’t help commenting. Most were good natured enough, but one guy was downright hostile. He called us “freaks” and rather aggressively admonished us about how we were gonna get splinters if we attempted to take the flight of wooden stairs he’d just finished hauling himself up. We shrugged it off and went on our way, but it stuck with me, and his reaction calls up a few things about barefooting and minimal footwear and marketing and humans.

As Ted likes to say, we like to buy our solutions. Hurts when you run? Figure out the perfect shoe to solve your problem — the more padding, the better. Learn to run differently? Work on your form and technique? Bah. Too hard. Takes too long. And … there’s no money to be made by shoe companies selling technique, or barefoot running.

Ted calls the Fivefingers a Trojan Horse for barefooting. Finally, a product we can BUY to make a move toward a more natural approach to running. I get weird looks and many questions when I wear mine. A Facebook friend hopes barefoot running doesn’t catch on because he doesn’t like looking at people’s naked feet. I see shoes like these (which cost HOW MUCH?) and marvel at the power of marketing and fashion, which has convinced us shoes that resemble malformed hooves (as Twitter friend @suebob described these) are considered attractive, but shoes that look like feet, or even just the feet themselves, are thought to be repulsive or bizarre.

For me barefooting is a way to strip away some of the unnecessary layers that stand between us and our world. Are there some sharp/rough/hot/cold/yucky things out there I don’t really want to run on? Sure. But there’s a sense of being connected, through my body, to the Earth that only comes when I’m ACTUALLY TOUCHING IT (the Earth, not my body. Sicko.). Barefoot Ted isn’t dogmatic about barefoot running, and neither am I. Sometimes a little protection is desired, even necessary. So I’m out to discover out how LITTLE extra gear I need to run healthy, happy, and injury free, rather than figuring out how much I can pile on and still lift my feet.

Tagged as: books, vibram fivefingers