Barefoot Running

[Jolt]

Nobody believes that.

However, everyone recognizes that humans were never meant to be sitting on their butts all day long in front of a computer and then rip off their shoes after wearing them for 40 years and start running barefoot on asphalt.

I have to roll my eyes at most of the barefoot hoorah from both sides in the media. Folks who grew up in the country (where we spent the summer barefoot outgrowing our shoes) spent a lot of time barefoot as kids. I've been running barefoot my whole life and still do. But I fall out laughing when some soft city-slicker goes out running on asphalt and concrete barefoot and goes rhapsodic over how "natural" it is. Nope, dirt and rocks and cow pies are "natural." Asphalt is a repetitive stress injury just waiting to happen, and it does regardless of the fitness of the runner: metatarsal stress fractures and plantar fasciitis are a'comin' down the pike.

Look at your foot. It is an amazingly beautiful thing. Flexible and irregular to interact elegantly with irregular surfaces. In one split second it is soft and molds itself around the surface it lands on, in the next split second it is a rigid lever and pushes off that same surface. All those little muscles let the foot change its shape so one step it is domed up over a sharp rock and the next step it is sagged down into a hole in the path, constantly interacting and adapting to the changing world so your legs can do their work. Asphalt is just slamming this beautiful foot onto the same flat hard boring surface over and over again. Slam-slam-slam. No variety. Muscles fatigue and fail, while others don't get the chance to do their job. Some bones crack under the constant unremitting unvarying pressure.

I don't blame shoes for modern man's foot woes. I blame asphalt.

I agree. I'll bet these guys were running primarily on hard, flat surfaces as you are describing, and that's how they got into trouble. If they had been running trails at least part of the time, they likely wouldn't have gotten the overuse injuries that they did. Asphalt is kind of a crappy surface to do a lot of running on whether barefoot or in shoes, and you're right, it's NOT natural. Better to mix things up so you're not overloading the same structures all the time. As for me, I'll continue running barefoot or in VFFs because it's been working well for me and I know not to overdo the hard flat surfaces (they're horribly boring anyway!).

And another thing: I wonder how many of these "PF" cases from barefoot running are really referred pain from trigger points in foot and calf muscles that are being used in unaccustomed ways and knotting up. Could be that for some of these patients all they need is to work those out and their problem will go away.