Death To Zombies

I started hearing about some crazy movement probably 15 years ago.  Some “idiot” was trying to convince everyone that we didn’t need running shoes.  Considering the fact that I was about to start basic training and was running a few miles each day and fighting shin splints all the time I thought the guy was nuts.  My non-comms felt the same way and since they were gods, I believed them.

But it seems that perhaps the “crazy” people were right.  There’s a new trend in running that says basically three things, a) you should be running barefoot, b) you are capable of running for hours or days longer than you think and c) running on running shoes is the main cause of Americans not winning long distance races any more on an Olympic scale.

The basic premise is cursory, but useful, that human being’s genetics are based on the hunter gatherer model and not on the more recent invention of farmers let alone on the VERY recent invention of shoes.  The reality is that our bodies are built for covering extremely long distances on foot, locating prey while doing so and then having the intelligence to trap and kill animals.  The current question of shoes or no shoes has more to do with the stride that was taken during these long hunts and what is currently popular.

Years ago I trained for triathlons and as I added longer and longer runs I fought again with shin splints.  Then I read about techniques and shoes that could combat this problem.  I tried the different shoes but was skeptical of one assertion which was that I just needed to buy more shoes more often as I was fat and therefore needed more padding in my shoes.

The technique that was forwarded was an interesting learning experience though.  Basically some of the books recommended that I just take much more frequent and shorter strides thus decreasing the angle of attack between my shin and the ground.  This “solution” seemed to have helped for a bit and certainly more than the “buy more shoes” technique.

There was another point of the argument that was very confusing for an outsider to sports medicine.  If you want to exercise just for your overall health running is by far the best sport for your bones because the impact of your foot striking the ground causes your bones to grow stronger as opposed to bicycling or swimming.  So there’s the conundrum, run hard to build strong bones but buy good shoes, very often, to prevent that damage that creates strong bones.  It really just didn’t make any sense.  But then again, our genetics probably aren’t well adapted to us all being so fat either.

Eventually I got tired of running tons of hours and my interest in endurance events came to an end.  But the question of shoes versus stride has stuck in my mind for a long time.  So when I heard more and more about the barefoot running trend I paid a little bit of attention.  It turns out that at a very basic level the no-shoes attitude has the same arguments that the buy more shoes school had.  If you shuffle along in your bare feet that’s better than jogging or running in running shoes.  Since you take a shorter stride when you run barefoot, you lessen the angle of attack and therefore don’t impact your bones as much only cheaper.  And by the way, one of the fastest E6s I ever saw took tiny steps but he took them super fast.

I already knew that I could run indefinitely.  While completing two half-ironman length triathlons I learned that basically my will was the only thing preventing me from completing longer distances.  Well, to be completely honest I learned that at a much younger age.  Perhaps when I learned that walking was the greatest form of freedom.  No one could deny me the ability to walk to wherever I wanted if I just had the patience to walk there.  But over the years I’ve proved this fact again and again.  I proved it in the 25 mile memorial death march I did with my drill sergeants at White Sands Proving Grounds and I proved it again and again as I got older.  Bottom line?  The human spirit is indomitable.

So I’ve been trying it our for a few months.  I haven’t been running, but I’ve been walking around in bare feet more than I have since I was a kid and I have to tell you that my feet feel great and my knees don’t hurt.  It’s hard to know if the lack of knee pain is due to a ranch style house I moved into 2 years ago or the lack of shoes.  But if you’ve found this interesting, you might also enjoy the article on the same topic, by a better writer at Wired.com