Recently, there has been a revival in barefoot running. Every once in a while, Runner's World will publish an article about it or a shoe company will debut a shoe that is designed to cover your foot and provide the same benefits as barefoot running. However, in the short 10 years that I have been running, this is the largest barefoot craze I have seen! This is due mostly to a book that was recently published titled, Born to Run. The book is about the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico who are natural ultra-marathoners running over 400 miles in several days, without stopping, for fun. Yes, read it again, I said, "for fun."I decided to start reading this book in August and since I have a lot of other reading to do for school, I try to read one chapter each time I sit down with it. The amazing thing is that another reading I was doing for school related so closely to it. The author of this other reading, Soul of Nowhere, opened his book by mentioning the Sierra Madre Occidental area in Northern Mexico. Ironically, this is the same exact place that the Tarahumara people still live.
It was interesting to read one day about an anthropologist studying an ancient people and the next day read about a people who still existed in that same part of the world. The anthropologist mentions that that these ancient people lived in cliffs and crags in an effort to fend off other indian tribes by hiding. Ironically, the Tarahumara people still live in cliff sides and crags in an effort to preserve their way of life. I very quickly realized that the Tarhumara people were the remnants of the ancient Mexicans that I had just finished reading about.
To take this one step farther, the anthropologist writes about an old sandal he found in an abandoned dwelling. When observing the wear pattern on the sandals he explains that it is not the same as the wear patterns or footprints of today. "The foot bore the well-used imprint of its owner. I traced my finger along the shape of this person's stride, asking questions. Here was the heel pressing outward and the gathered bulge just before the ball of the foot. The person had walked with most of the weight toward the outside, rolling the foot along the edge rather than landing flat-footed, as most Americans do now. The person's big toe took very little pressure when stepping off, suggesting that the next foot was already firmly on the ground before body weight shifted. There was no kick-off- to the next step. The back foot actually floated off the ground and ahead, no weight to it at all... It was not a way of walking on city sidewalks, no the step of a person who trusts the ground for its regularity."
When I was reading this, I realized that there was actual evidence that our foot, knee, hip, back, and neck problems could all be caused by us wearing footwear on hard, flat surfaces! It isn't just superhuman people that can run 100 miles in 15 hours without shoes on, in fact it is that we can't because we have changed our biomechanics by putting shoes on our feet!
I also made an observation recently when fitting some high-school girls for some shoes. I noticed that all of them had feet that were size 9.5 of larger, a very unusual thing to take place amongst women. When talking to one of my co-workers about it, he briefly mentioned the flip-flop generation. I again, never realized that by putting our feet in shoes, we are essentially, binding them. We are not allowing our feet to splay out and be the foundation that our large bodies need. Maybe there was something to short, native people- they didn't have a tall body because their little feet couldn't support it.
I know this is more like journal entry than a blog, but this the biomechanist inside of me is just screaming for me to remove my footwear and run savage through the streets of Salt Lake City, proclaiming my new found knowledge. I guess my small blog will have to do. I do find myself asking, is there really something to this whole barefoot running thing and is it worth giving it a shot?
