No Shoes for You!

That's it. My new Asics last September did nothing to help the achilles tendonitis that struck last August.

Never had it before. Not even a twinge. Then, at the end of an easy 8 mile run, followed by some hill work, I was done. Could barely hobble home.

That was six months ago.

I have tried a few easy runs since then, but they always resulted in a couple of days of pain.

I have been patient. I have done countless calf raises, with and without weight. Through the winter, I have bored myself to tears on a cross trainer. On a stationary bike. But I can't seem to burn as many calories as I did running (though lately Mike R's "Killer Abs" courses at the gym have been great for the core). I have packed on 8 pounds and itch to run. But I can't.

And then today I finished Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall. And it all gelled.

It's not me. It's not the hills. It's not the 8 mile run. It's the shoes.

McDougall goes in search of the world's most perfectly evolved runners, looking at what makes them tick. His quest was set in motion by his own running injury and his desire to answer a simple question: Why do my feet hurt?

Because they shouldn't. We are animals engineered to run. In fact, as McDougall shows (all to late in the book for my taste, but man does he tell a great story getting there; I can't recommend this book highly enough), what set us apart evolutionarily was in fact our ability to run, our need to run in order to survive and run down game. And we don't need any fancy shoes, any anti-pronation, stabilizers to keep doing what we have been doing since we became Homo erectus.

We've been running for 2 million years. Our feet have half the bones in our body and an incredibly strong and ingenious arch structure, engineered to carry us aloft, to help us fly across the Serengeti. But we let some bozos from Oregon (McDougall gives the skinny on them, aka Nike, too) tell us we need arch support and stabilization and heel padding and shock absorbing shoes.

No, we just need a little protection from the road and some way to regain the strength our feet have lost - atrophied and coddled in $100 trainers assembled by Asian slave laborers.

The running shoes we have seen to be so necessary may actually be causing many of our knee and heel and achilles and other foot problems, because they don't allow (demand!) that our feet adjust. They don't allow us to feel the road, to fire the nerve endings in our feet (there's a reason this is one of the most sensitive areas of our bodies!). They don't let us land as we should, naturally, on the balls of our feet instead of striking with our heels.

This also relates to the work of Nicholas Romanov, who I first read about in Runner's World a year or so ago. He and others seem to be on to something about the proper form of running, using gravity to work for you and striking on the balls of the feet. Romanov also wrote a book...

So there are two things that need to be done: (1) change your shoes (or just take them off and run barefoot); (2) change how you run.

Today I jumped online and ordered a pair of Vibram Five Fingers. [Check out the excellent video on their front page; the doctor interviewed is also discussed by McDougall in his book.] Just $75 direct from them, so about the same or less than a paid of new shoes. (They are also available through Amazon.)

On the second issue, I'm going to take it slow, trotting a few miles at a time, waiting for the snow to recede, trying to follow the general technique of Romanov and others, leaning into the run, hitting the balls of the feet instead of the heels, something we apparently do naturally if we take our shoes off.

And I am going to look for some exercises to restrengthen my flabby foot muscles.

I owe my prehistoric ancestors that much.