The Sole of the Problem

I recently fin­ished read­ing Born to Run, A Hid­den Tribe, Superath­letes, and the Great­est Race the World Has Never Seen. To say that it turned every­thing I thought I knew about run­ning upside down would be an under­state­ment. I lit­er­ally dis­cov­ered that things I had just learned about run­ning – and from some of the most accom­plished coaches out there – were com­pletely wrong. In fact, some of the lessons peo­ple taught me could very well have been con­tribut­ing to my injuries! It has been an incred­i­ble rev­e­la­tion and a whirl­wind of a men­tal turn­around. What I had pre­vi­ously done to take care of myself and avoid injury was actu­ally increas­ing my chances of injury. I don’t think I’ve expe­ri­enced such a shock since learn­ing that rein­deer can’t fly.

I’m talk­ing about learn­ing that run­ning shoes are worse for your feet than wear­ing no shoes at all. This is big folks, really, really big.

I recently paid top dol­lar for a pair of Asics and Super­Feet in-soles. It’s not like I just blindly pur­chased an expen­sive sneaker because I thought money meant a bet­ter and safer shoe, though. I did my research. I went to Road­run­ner Sports and had my feet, stride, and even prona­tion closely exam­ined. They watched me while I ran on a tread­mill and then we watched play­back together of my stride on the mon­i­tor. They mea­sured every dimen­sion of my foot and used their knowl­edge from spe­cific train­ing to fig­ure out what the best shoe would be for me. I didn’t just plonk down money for a shoe that had the best mar­ket­ing pitch. I used sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy, and pro­fes­sional exper­tise to make a wise choice.

How is it then, that top dol­lar, access to decades of research by some of the best foot sci­en­tists in the world, and the advice of a num­ber of marathon run­ners pro­vided  me with worse odds that I would sus­tain an injury than if I ran with noth­ing on my feet at all?!!

Per­haps I should explain what has changed my point of view so dra­mat­i­cally over the course of just a few weeks. As I men­tioned, it all started with a book. For­tu­itously, I walked into our local book­store, Books Inc., and asked if they had a book titled, “Why We Run.” Two friends had rec­om­mended the book to me in the past 24 hours, so I fig­ured I’d check it out. The woman behind the counter typed the title into the com­puter and said she wasn’t find­ing any­thing. She did say, though, that they had a book that had recently been pub­lished, and per­haps that was the book my friends meant. It was called Born to Run. I read the back cover and inset of the book she handed me and was sold. Even if this wasn’t the book my friends had sug­gested, it looked like a good read on the same subject.

Sev­eral days later I was read­ing the last few pages of the book, my head spin­ning with the sen­sa­tion that comes from equal excite­ment and trep­i­da­tion. Just like that, my world had changed. I felt a new life-force awak­en­ing from within, even in the midst of near-constant back pain. The author, Chris Mcdougall, had so skill­fully laid out the facts along with com­pelling and vivid anec­dotes that I already felt like a bet­ter run­ner for the knowl­edge I had gained. I learned that recent under­stand­ings at the Uni­ver­sity of Utah and Har­vard have shown that we sur­vived as a species because we could run longer than any other ani­mal. I also came to under­stand that there were vir­tu­ally no plan­tar fasci­tis or other foot and knee injuries before Nike intro­duced run­ning shoes to the world in 1972. And I “observed” ultra­run­ners tear­ing up and down moun­tains and through canyons, run­ning for hours and hours on end with noth­ing more than a piece of tire thread stuck to the bot­tom of their feet. I was mes­mer­ized. Blown away. And upset.

Take this bit from the begin­ning of chap­ter 25 from the book Born to Run, by Chris McDougall:

Run­ning shoes may be the most destruc­tive force to ever hit the human foot…consider these words by Dr. Daniel Lieber­man, a pro­fes­sor of bio­log­i­cal anthro­pol­ogy at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity. “A lot of foot and knee injuries that are cur­rently plagu­ing us are actu­ally caused by peo­ple run­ning with shoes that actu­ally make our feet weak, cause us to over-pronate, give us knee prob­lems. Until 1972, when the mod­ern ath­letic shoe was invented by Nike, peo­ple ran in very thin-soled shoes, had strong feet, and had much lower inci­dence of knee injuries.”

“If there’s any magic bul­let to make human beings healthy, it’s to run.” Magic bul­let? The last time a sci­en­tist with Dr. Lieberman’s cre­den­tials used that term, he’d just cre­ated peni­cillin. Dr. Lieber­man knew it, and meant it. If run­ning shoes never existed, he was say­ing, more peo­ple would be run­ning. If more peo­ple ran, fewer would be dying of degen­er­a­tive heart dis­ease, sud­den car­diac arrest, hyper­ten­sion, blocked arter­ies, dia­betes, and most other deadly ail­ments of the West­ern world. That’s a stag­ger­ing amount of guilt to lay at Nike’s feet. But the most remark­able part? Nike already knew it.

I was furi­ous. And not at Nike as much as myself. How could I let myself be duped, again? I, along with mil­lions of oth­ers, have been dis­cov­er­ing that indus­try after indus­try that we thought was fine had been filled with lies, greed, and hot air. Read­ing Fast Food Nation showed me just how bad fast food com­pa­nies were. Nickel and Dimed shown a bright light on all of the cock roaches that hire the poor and take advan­tage of them. And many of my own expe­ri­ences along with front-page sto­ries have given me a solid under­stand­ing of how the health­care indus­try is more inter­ested in drug money than my per­sonal well-being. Now run­ning shoe man­u­fac­tur­ers were part of that group too? Nike had gained my respect and con­fi­dence only to reveal they didn’t give a damn about whether I would get injured or not! What’s up with this world?!

Of course, it’s not quite that sim­ple. Just because Nike was the first com­pany to cre­ate the run­ning shoe doesn’t mean they deserve all of the blame or that other com­pa­nies are inno­cent. I also doubt too many employ­ees within Nike or other ath­letic com­pa­nies spend their time schem­ing on new ways to take my money and leave me phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally limp­ing for life. In fact, I know one of the inno­va­tion exec­u­tives at Nike and have seen first-hand his love for both run­ning and all who run. Yet the facts and obser­va­tions of peo­ple who were inti­mately involved in the cre­ation of Nike and its busi­ness strate­gies over the years – co-founder Bow­er­man him­self, no less – leave no ques­tion in my mind: Nike know­ingly pro­duces shoes that  harm peo­ple. And now, after Nike and other com­pa­nies have pro­duced flex­i­ble, “min­i­mal” shoes, it’s obvi­ous that they know it too. As Chris McDougall points out, in a sick twist, Nike is try­ing to fig­ure out a way to profit from the very prob­lems they helped cause in the first place.

As we learn in Born to Run, in 2001, Nike reps were pay­ing a visit to Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity, observ­ing the run­ners they spon­sored. The Stan­ford run­ning coach, Vin Lananna, had become a liv­ing leg­end of sorts after he had lead his teams to five NCAA team cham­pi­onships and 22 indi­vid­ual titles. He obvi­ously knew how to turn good run­ners into great ones. That after­noon, as the Nike reps watched the team train, they noticed that no one was wear­ing shoes. Asked to explain what was going on, coach Vin said, “I can’t prove this, but I believe when my run­ners train bare­foot, they run faster and suf­fer fewer injuries.”  Nike knew at that moment that the bare­foot trend was not going away. If coach Vin was telling his kids to run bare­foot when he had an unend­ing sup­ply of the best shoes Nike could pro­duce, Nike bet­ter pay attention.

So, Nike gath­ered their best researchers to try take a closer look at bare­foot run­ning. They watched tape of some of their run­ners in slow motion strid­ing with­out shoes. What they saw was incred­i­ble. They were blown away by the things the feet were doing. Take a look at the fol­low­ing video to get a sense of what they saw. It’s the best video I’ve seen so far in demon­strat­ing how wear­ing big, cushy run­ning shoes alters the way we run. Doc­tor Sil­ver­man explains and high­lights why the run­ning form that comes from wear­ing shoes actu­ally put a strain on the feet,  legs, and knees. Note that the video is of the same run­ner, on the same day, with no instruc­tion given in between videos. On the left, cor­rect nice shoe­less fore­foot strike. On the right, incor­rect, with shoes, heel strike, brak­ing, strain­ing.

See the dif­fer­ence? Don’t you feel for the poor bas­tard wear­ing the shoes? It sure doesn’t look natural.

Hrere’s a video show­ing the dif­fer­ence between the heel-toe foot strike that thick run­ning shoes tend to make you do, and a front-foot-first strike that run­ning bare­foot or with Five Fin­gers promotes:

Amazon’s page for Born to Run, A Hid­den Tribe, Superath­letes, and the Great­est Race the World Has Never Seen includes a video of the author talk­ing about what lead him to write the book:

I am plan­ning on pur­chas­ing a pair of Vibram Five Fin­gers and start­ing to walk in them while I wait for my back surgery. When I’m finally able to run again, I will wear them as much as pos­si­ble with a goal to start run­ning trail races in them. I’ll let you know how it goes.

What do you think? Have you tried at least prac­tic­ing bare­foot or min­i­mal running?

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