Barefoot Running

[Susan]

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.

And everyone recognizes that some folks are better runners than others. Hot and sexy runners will be hot and sexy regardless of shoes or bare feet. Crappy runners can be better runners with shoes that help them. Some feet (especially "Irish" or "Greek" or long-second-ray-long-toes feet) do better without the highly engineered shoes on the market these days, because they were made for the other foot structure ("Egyptian" or short-second-ray-short-toes feet).

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 was referring to the linked article that says:

"Hence, “If we can say that everyone is built to run barefoot we can say that everyone is built to fly a fighter jet without glasses,” says Pribut. “We don’t all have 20/20 vision.”

I find it misleading.
Of course what you say is true and someone used to wearing shoes for 40 years probably can't rip of their shoes and go out running on concrete for miles and miles and expect that it will do any good - I totally agree with you.
But that doesn't mean that humans were originally "not made" for going barefoot the way we are not made to fly fighter jets (with or without glasses) - of course we are. Even the not-so-good runners (like me) are born with feet made to go barefoot. While I won't ever be a world class runner, and agree that I would need the right genes or bodily features for it, with some training I am able to do the activity called "running" because the human body per se is capable of it.

The article says

"Consider this: Every cheetah is a world-class sprinter. No exceptions. By contrast, the degree of interindividual variation in distance running ability in the human population is incredibly vast."

I don't know. The authors point of view seems distorted for me. Not everyone can be a competitive distance runner, it's probably true. Take a cheetah, put it in a small cage for the most part of it's life and maybe put some strange shoe-like things on it's feet. This cheetah probably won't be a world-class sprinter when released after several years. Maybe it will be fat and not used to exercise and have problems with it's joints and knees...
So, maybe every human is a runner. There is no need to be "world class" but maybe originally every human being was designed for running. Maybe it's just modern lifestyle that makes some people incapable of doing so.
I'm not a scientist, I can't verify this, it's just a thought.