Those Look Comfortable for Running

The nurse who took my blood today at UCSF dur­ing my pre-op noticed my black Vibram Five Fin­gers on my feet. With a sur­prised voice he said, “Oh, those are fancy shoes!” He asked if they were for swim­ming. When I responded say­ing they were for run­ning, it was my turn to be sur­prised. He responded, say­ing, “Those must be really com­fort­able to run in.” I replayed what he had just said in my mind since I’m used to peo­ple say­ing the com­plete oppo­site. As I too would have thought before I read Born to Run, the idea of run­ning with no padding or arch sup­port sounds painful to most. I asked him where he came from, since he spoke with an accent. Turns out he  hails from Togo, a small coun­try next to Ghana in West­ern Africa. He explained that he and his friends grew up run­ning bare­foot and they played soc­cer through­out high school bare­foot. He then shared a fas­ci­nat­ing story. The best run­ner around was about to run his biggest track meet of his life. He had caught the eyes of a run­ning shoe com­pany who gave a pair of shoes. He accepted them with pride, as it was a sym­bol of his suc­cess to date. How­ever, when he ran the cham­pi­onship race in the shoes, he lost! Upset and in dis­be­lief, he con­vinced the win­ner of the race to a re-match. This time he was going to run  bare­foot. The dif­fer­ence was remark­able: he crushed his oppo­nent in the 5ooo meter race by over a minute!