Barefoot running

Just this weekend a friend of mine made his goal of finishing the 26-mile New York City Marathon in under four hours. Looks like staying in on Halloween was worth it.

I'm not a runner. Well to be accurate, not even an exerciser. It's terrible, I know. Even just running a couple miles today would probably make my heart explode. But back in London as an undergrad classes were pretty easy, so to alleviate the crushing boredom and to work off those daily, insanely delicious scones with clotted cream, I started running. Of course I'd just get lost and end up jogging around greater London for 3 hours (there was no one to ask - out of hatred of crowds and fear of heat stroke I'd jog at 11pm despite a friend trying to arm me with pepper spray and a tracking anklet).

My heart adjusted but that wasn't even a problem compared to my feet and calves. I had never endured soreness like that from my lost-jogging. And my friend RAN 26-miles. Which is why I became so interested in barefoot shoes when I read this story in NYMag last spring.

Adam Sternbergh lists several pieces of evidence that modern footwear is bad for our feet, making us run in a way that completely contrary to what nature intended, including this 2007 study which found that before we started wearing these shoes (not the 1700s but our caveman days) we had healthier feet and this 1991 study which found you're more prone to injuries with expensive shoes (meaning more padding and obstructions to your natural gait) than cheap ones. Apparently padded shoes interfere with our natural gait and rolling of the foot from the heel to the arch to toes pushing off from the ground, making us spend 5% more energy walking with shoes and increasing the pressure on our feet and knees.

But wandering around barefoot in NYC is asking for trouble, so now there are shoes as mainstream as the Nike Free (introduced in 2005) to more fringe-ier types like the Vibram Five Fingers (introduced in the US in 2006), from an Italian company that at first wanted to design shoes for boaters and kayakers. Then it won the 2007 Time award for best inventions.
They're not exactly Louboutins but I've been intrigued to try them for a while now, (even though they're $85) if I were still a lost-jogger.

Is barefoot running truly good for you? There's actually a lot of debate, with a study even admitting there's not enough evidence to know for sure, despite previous studies. Even the guy that barefooters hold up as the prime example, Ethiopian Abebe Bikila who won the first of his consecutive Olympic gold medals barefoot in 1960, donned a pair of Asics in the Tokyo Olympics and set another record. And barefoot running has recently gained a cult following, with people like Ken Saxton leading the way. There are even blogs about the barefoot experience like Ted's.

What people are saying now is that you should ease into barefoot running, and it seems everything should be in moderation, especially when some people are just biomechanically imperfect, which is really just stating the obvious.

But the barefoot business is booming. According to the NYT, barefoot shoemaker Terra Plana expects to sell 70,000 shoes this year, double from last year, and Vibram says its FiveFingers shoes have tripled every year since it was introduced here in 2006, expecting this year's US sales to be $10 million. That might be small fries in a $17 billion athletic shoe industry but given the growth, its a clear trend to watch.