I am a barefoot runner.
Why yes, I am wearing shoes.
OK, let me explain.
So I don't run around in my bare feet while
snobbishly staring down all the poor sods with their shod feet, spouting out
random indictments of the conspiracy of big brand shoe companies that have
enslaved the masses in their over engineered torture apparatuses. (No, it's not
apparati, regardless of how cool that would sound.)
I do occasionally run in a pair of Vibram Five
Fingers for some shorter runs, usually 5km or less. I get a kick out of the
strange looks and stranger comments, although, the things I hear from kids is
the best. (My battery commander's son used to call them "foot
gloves")
More often than not, though, I have a pair of
modest minimal shoes, with a pair of socks, and I rarely stand out in the
crowd.
My journey to minimal running has been fraught with
hard learned lessons and painful injuries, and spans my entire running career
all the way back to a slightly chunky 5th grader sweating it out with his dad
on a dirt trail.
Perhaps a little history of my running career is
called for.
I was about 11 years old when my father first took
me out running. He was a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army, and as such, was
expected to maintain a pretty high level of fitness. I had always been a
skinny kid, played a lot of baseball (badly) and soccer (worse), but puberty
was setting in and seemed to have other ideas for my metabolism. My father
decided that my brother and I needed to learn some good personal fitness habits
and started taking us out to the dirt trail to run laps with him.
Through middle school and high school I
participated heavily in both track and cross-country. Let's face it; I had no
skills when it came to any other sport (they cut me from the soccer team two
years in a row) and how hard is it to run in a straight line, or around a
track. And they let pretty much anyone come out for the track and cross-country
teams, regardless of ability. I was never the fast kid, but I enjoyed the
camaraderie and have always had a special penchant for suffering. Training was
pretty simple; go out and run as far and as fast as you can. I had one coach
that put us through various workouts of differing distances and intensities,
but the premise was the same. Run hard and you will succeed. Run slow and it'll
take you longer to finish. Oh, sure, he espoused other more intellectual and
technical lessons for running, but I was a teenager and quite literally,
everything went in one ear and out the other side with a slight whistling
vibration as it passed through. No, I didn't need someone to teach me how to
run. It should come naturally to each of us, right? I mean, come one, my
caveman ancestors had to run away from all lions and tigers and bears just to
stay alive, didn't they?
I endured ankle strains, knee pain, hip pain, and
countless shin splints. It seemed that I was always hurting somewhere on my
body. But I was a runner, and runners were supposed to be in pain. Running was
an honorable sport, and as with all honorable pursuits, glory is only achieved
through prolonged and legendary suffering.
I graduated in 2000 and college changed all that.
It was a time of beer, cigarettes, and more coffee and hard liquor than a human
should probably consume in half a lifetime. I gave up running and took up a
more self-indulgent lifestyle.
 |
| Smiling during a 5k, what's wrong with this guy? |
A year after graduation I enlisted in the U.S. Army
Reserves and started running again. Pounds that had slowly built up through my
epicurean college years started to fade away. Between the increased mileage and
the fervor of the Drill Sergeants, I was able to drop back under 200 pounds. I
continued to train for the next few years, and in 2008, I successfully
completed my first half marathon.
While training, I was starting to notice something.
I was falling into a pattern that had become all too familiar during high school,
the cycle of train-injury-recovery. At the time, I accepted this as a natural
course of an amateur runner. Much of the literature available, and much of this
from sports medicine professionals, dictated that most runners would be
injured, and the only solution was to stop running, recover, and then resume
training, albeit at a lower level of intensity.
I continued this pattern while also increasing my
mileage. My goal was to run my first full marathon in the fall of 2009. By now,
I was living in El Paso, TX, and had discovered what I thought was a secret
weapon in the battle against running injuries. A local shoe company, Spira footwear,
had developed a unique running shoe that used proprietary spring technology to
negate the effects of shock on the body during a heel-toe foot strike. For the
first 6 months of use, I believed them. My knee pains went away, my ankle pains
disappeared, and I almost forgot what a shin splint was. As I piled on the
miles, the injuries slowly crept back into my world. Research told me that it
was the shoes breaking down over time, that I just needed to replace them more
often. So, after putting on roughly 250 miles, I bought a new pair, thinking my
problems were solved through the tactical application of newer equipment. This
time it lasted for about three months before the pain returned. I realized I
was back in the vicious cycle of train-injury-recovery all over again, only now
I was also forking over a hundred bucks at a time to fend off the injuries.
There had to be some way to train consistently without breaking the bank and
tearing my body slowly apart. Even with the most cutting edge and revolutionary
shoes on my feet, I was taking days to recover from a long run, and a good race
could have me sidelined for a week. The shoes weren't cutting it, so what was I
to do?
Somehow, I found myself watching a morning news
show, talking heads interviewing some middle-aged, average looking joe about a
super human running tribe in Mexico. They had discovered the secret to
everlasting life and limitless endurance potential, or something like that. He
had written a book that all but promised to share these secrets through his
personal journey of self-discovery and exploration. By now I was becoming
desperate to solve my running dilemma and all but begged my wife for an early
birthday gift.
I received two books for my birthday in 2009, Chi Running
and Born
to Run. I read both books, cover to cover. While Chi Running was a
more technical look at improving individual running form, and I highly
recommend it for anyone interested in injury free running, I was most affected
by Chris McDougall's book about the Tarahumara tribe and his personal
exploration into the world of ultra distance running. Here were human beings
that not only could train for and run distances far exceeding my humble
marathon goals, but they did so injury free and for decades beyond the normal
career expectancy of your average western runner.
I had always been taught that becoming a better
runner meant sacrifice and suffering. That running was painful was par for the
course and must simply be endured. But here was an entirely different paradigm
of running and training. To run not only injury free, but pain free.
I was sold. I became a barefoot runner. I
enlisted in the cult of the barefoot tribe, jumped straight onto the bandwagon
of followers that held McDougall's Born to Run as their bible, and started
espousing the virtues of a minimalist philosophy that I didn't even fully
understand. Yet.
OK, so I didn't just take my shoes off and jog
Kenyan style into the Mexican sunset. I tossed my Spira, stabilizing, spring
cushioned, state of the art, long distance running shoes into the trash and
went to the outlet store and bought a $10 pair of New Balance tennies.
(On a side note. My dad used to own a pair of gray
New Balance tennies. This was back before New Balance got into the high-end
technical sports apparel and equipment market and was commonly regarded as
poorly produced, cheap and simple footwear for everyday use. No professional
athlete would have been caught dead in their shoes. But my father continued to
buy and wear the same running shoes for his entire military career. Probably
still does. So, in my mind, they were the cheapest shoes with the least amount
of technical devices to interfere with my form that I could think of.)
The wife and I started studying. We would both go
out for runs around the neighborhood and take turns analyzing each other’s
style and form. We studied the wear patterns on the bottoms of our shoes to
determine foot strike. We watched clips of distance runners online, became avid
followers of every barefoot running blogger we could find. We became running
form Nazis. Any discussion of running form would elicit immediate criticism or
commentary from either of us. We were self-anointed priests of the New World
Order of Running. With just enough education to make us dangerous we set out to
educate the world, or at least, those of our friends and coworkers that had the
misfortune of uttering the words "pronation" or "stability"
during a barbecue.
The wife and I started taking trips to the running
track where we'd doff our shoes and tenderly prance around the track to toughen
our soles and calves. I bought my first pair of Vibram Five Fingers in 2010,
followed shortly by a pair of Merrel Barefoot trail shoes for use during
Physical Training. (The U.S. Army still does not allow "toe shoes"
while in uniform or conducting organized PT.) My first short run in the Five
Fingers ended about three quarters of a mile in, with me limping back home,
pride left out on the track and my calves so sore I couldn't run for three
days.
It all sounded so simple. Read a book, do some
barefoot laps, buy some neat looking shoes and all your problems are solved.
But it wasn't that easy. I still battled injuries and had to learn, the hard
way usually, that it's less about the shoes and more about the form of the
runner. It's been a long process, sometimes painful and slow, to develop my
running style. Thankfully, I have a wife that was willing to follow me down the
proverbial rabbit hole into the world of barefoot/minimal running. Together, we
were able to set aside our mindless passion for the barefoot world and allow
time and experience to evolve our passion for running.
There have been setbacks. I irritated my iliotibial
band during a marathon in 2011 and couldn't run for over a month. But gone are
the endless incessant injuries that would sideline me for weeks or months at a
time.
As my running form continued to mature, I began to
truly understand the point of Born to Run and the minimalist movement. It
wasn't about shedding footwear to run faster or longer. It was about learning
how to read your body, to understand the signs and symptoms that lead to injury.
I learned how to run in a relaxed state, self-aware and constantly adjusting my
stride, my posture and my foot strike depending on the terrain and distance I
was covering. I no longer preach about the McDougall and Tarahumara stories as
if they are the messiahs of running. Rather, their lesson is one of self-awareness
and experimentation, not through trial and error, but through a constant state
of self-evaluating and relaxed and less determined way of running.
Running has become less of a painful enterprise
with occasional flashes of euphoria. Now, an entire run can be a beatific
experience. I run free from the mask of "endurance" I once placed on
my body to hide from the pain or running poorly or injured. You might say, I am
unshod in that I don't hide from the sensations of pain, but use them to
identify what is wrong and correct it before I suffer injury.
So, yeah, I'm a barefoot runner. I just like to wear shoes and socks
while I'm barefoot.
