Generally I wouldn’t write on a topic that’s been covered as thoroughly and in-depth as minimalism has the last few years, but my cousin asked me my opinion. That said, here goes.
The basic premise of the present movement towards running without shoes is, as far as I can tell, is that if God had wanted us to wear shoes, we would have been born with shoes on…and shoes companies keep making bigger and bulkier shoes so as to make us dependent upon them…and just look at the Tarhumara Indians and how far they run and how they never experience debilitating injuries…and they don’t wear shoes. Oh, and how could I forget: the Kenyans who almost literally run circles around every other nationality in the world grow up without shoes on, and look how fast they are!
Full disclosure: I work at a running store and my job is to sell running shoes to the masses.
When I was fifteen years old I began to read on a high school running message board about this crazy thing called “minimalism” that could potentially make me faster. This was early 2006, three full years before Christopher McDougall’s “Bible of Minimalism,” Born to Run, was published. This message board discussion wasn’t a bunch of high school kiddies following the most recent fad. It was a collection of high school runners who were attempting to reach the highest possible level of running allowed by their talent through self-experimentation. This running message board was where I first learned of the now-famous Vibram FiveFingers. It was where I first considered heel-striking to be a bad thing, where I learned, in detail, the process of transitioning to minimalism and eventually barefoot running, and where I formed my opinions on the subject which hold true today.
After reading discourse on the subject and reading various posters’ results with their minimalism experiments for several months, I began watching videos of world class runners racing. Nearly all of them were mid-or-forefoot strikers, meaning that their foot initially touched the ground in the middle or front of it—as opposed to at their heel. In my mind, this seemed like a good argument for minimalism, or, at least, the premises of minimalism. However, I couldn’t afford to blow money on a pair of shoes that weren’t actually shoes unless I knew it would work. At the time I was training in the Nike Air Structure Triax, a stability shoe designed to prevent over-pronation.
After several months of reading about it all, and somewhat constant shin splints, I decided I was going to convert to forefoot striking. I laced up my Structure Triaxs, jumped out the door, and went on a several mile run. The entire run, all I thought about was making sure I landed more on my toes than on my heel. I focused on nothing but the process the entire run. And for a few weeks, every run that followed. Pretty soon I was able to run with a forefoot strike without really thinking about it. Over time, it became more of a midfoot strike. Today, five years later, I am regularly told by various coaches that I have incredible running form.
After transitioning from being a heel-striker to a midfoot-striker, I quickly grew weary of the big, bulky Structure Triaxs. Especially the nifty feature that included the Zoom Air unit popping after a lot of miles (I don’t know why, but this isn’t an issue for me anymore). I had also heard that adidas made very good trainers, and I wanted to try them out…and their lack of an Air unit was intriguing. Finally, I found a pair of adidas Supernova Light shoes online for $50. That was my initial foray into training in lighter shoes—what we call “performance trainers” in the shoe industry. It went really well, and I was hooked. Lighter shoes feel better to run in, I think. I went on to train in the Nike Zoom Skylon after the Supernova Light was discontinued, and then after the Skylon was discontinued, I trained in marathon racing flats for about a year (most of my training at the time was done on dirt trails, though). Today I train in the Nike Zoom Pegasus and the Nike LunarElite, and am greatly looking forward to the return of the Nike Zoom Elite—the first true performance trainer of theirs in a few years, in my opinion.
But I digress. I share all of that to give you a look into my footwear background. In 2009 when Born to Run was released, I was initially excited because it was super-duper popular and I wanted to see if the predictions of a second running boom would hold true.
However, as “minimalism” and “barefoot-running” and “Vibram FiveFingers” became catch-phrases in popular culture, I quickly became annoyed by the book. Its premise is ridiculous: the Tarahumara Indians run in rubber tire-based sandals and are rarely injured, so we, too, should run in as little shoe as possible so that we will never get injured.
Chris McDougall left out an important part, though: first, the Tarahumara Indians have been doing this whole running thing for hundreds or thousands of years. It’s their primary form of transportation. They do it from when they’re very young. Their bodies have adapted to it. And, possibly most importantly, they carry very little if any extra weight. They’re extremely lithe, and almost all of their running is on dirt and grass. Let me share a little secret: dirt and grass are extraordinarily forgiving; concrete and asphalt are not.
The purpose of the cushion in running shoes is to allow people to run on concrete and asphalt (henceforth referred to as “hard surfaces”) without injuring themselves. There are simply too many fragile bones in the human body to consider running barefoot or in extremely minimal shoes on hard surfaces a reasonable concept. Theoretically it’s possible. One must slowly transition, and in all reality we’re talking about a minimum of one-year process from training in “regular” running shoes to training in Vibram FiveFingers or the New Balance Minimus (which is essentially identical to the FiveFingers except with a normal toe box). But I feel that it would be more beneficial to take that year—or longer—and run more (longer, faster, harder, more frequently) and get better at the activity of running than it would be to take the time to properly transition into barefoot training.
I’m not opposed to going barefoot in certain aspects of training. I will often cool down after a hard track session by running barefoot on the infield. However, this isn’t because of some magical result that running barefoot will provide—it’s because it feels good to run barefoot in grass. (Although, I suppose it also stretches my calf and Achilles a little bit, which is beneficial because racing shoes have substantially less heel than training shoes, and I’m always pretty sore after longer races.)
I suppose it comes down to one’s goal with running. If their goal is to get fit or lose weight, then running more will be better than trying to transition into barefoot running. If their goal is to run fast, then running more will be better than trying to transition into barefoot running. However, if their goal is to run barefoot, then obviously there is only one logical course of action.