I’m not a runner. I would love to be a runner. Sometimes in my dreams I imagine myself swiftly running through flower-strewn fields with child-like abandonment, but in the real world I hate to run. I’m too tall, too fat, and too slow. Runners are sleek and compact. As much as I would love to be a runner, I’m not.
That’s why I surprised myself the other week when at the bookstore I saw a stack of books entitled, Born to Run. I glanced at the cover which displayed a primitive of some sort standing with his back to the camera atop a mountain surveying the distant skyline. I paused long enough to read the subtitle: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen and was intrigued. But as I said, I am not a runner so I passed by the book.
Even so, I found myself circling around the book several times, which in itself is ridiculous. I buy and read a lot of books. I couldn’t quite understand why, if this book held any interest to me, I didn’t just buy it. The price was right. At one point, I picked it up and read the book jacket, inside and out. Then I put it down and walked away, only to circle back around and pick it up again. I felt ridiculous. Why was I having such a hard time pulling the trigger? Why couldn’t I just buy the daggone book?
It’s probably because I’m not a runner. I can’t say it any plainer than that. I don’t run. I use to run – a little bit – before I got all kinds of injuries and quit, but even then I didn’t run very much. Once when I was in my early thirties and only 20 lbs overweight, I entered a 5k figuring I could do that without any training. I ended up having to walk half way through it. Somewhere I have a picture of me sprinting across the finish line with my head held high, shoulders back, and a smile on my face, but it was all for show. I knew the cameras would be clicking so I gave it everything I had a hundred yards from the finish line. That was my first and last race. I hated it.
So, I surprised myself when I arrived home with Born to Run in my possession. I was even more surprised when, out of all the books I purchased that day, I found myself picking it up to read. There was something fascinating to me about the thought that we were born to run.
Perhaps it had to do with a YouTube video I ran across a few days before my visit to the bookstore. It was one of those videos that appear on the first page of YouTube under the heading Recommended for You. I had been doing a lot of research into fitness and resistance training and had as a result watched a number of videos. YouTube thought I might enjoy a video on Persistence Hunting. I had never heard of such a thing, but I recognized the name of its creator, Sir David Attenborough, the legendary broadcaster and naturalist, and thought it might be worth watching. So I did.
It was incredible. It tells the story of a San tribesman on the Kalahari Desert who literally runs a male kudu (African antelope) to death in a chase that last 8 hours. Imagine that. A human being is actually capable of running an animal to death. It is speculated by some that long before man created primitive weapons, he used his ability to run great distances – unique to human beings – to hunt game. In essence, so the thinking goes, running is what makes us distinctly human.
I’m sure that’s why I was so taken by the title Born to Run. I wanted to know more. I wanted to understand why I dream of running when I can’t run a lick.
Now, I told you all of that so I could tell you this. I’ve had an epiphany. After reading this book, I discovered I actually like running. I may go so far as to say I love running, but that’s premature.
The book tells the fascinating story of the reclusive Tarahumara tribe who live in the remote Copper Canyons of Northern Mexico. For hundred of years, these hardy tribesmen have routinely run races of 50, 100, 150 miles a day without injury – and even more incredibly, without shoes. Think of that, they run the equivalent of 6 Boston Marathons back to back in the course of a day and without shoes. How do they do that?
Well, as it turns out, running barefoot is much healthier for you and your feet than wearing shoes – even if that shoe is the most advanced and technologically sophisticated shoe in the world – and scientist are starting to take notice. Look at this excerpt from a recent article entitled Why Expensive Trainers Could be Worse Than Useless:
Adidas sells a trainer with a microprocessor in the sole to customise cushioning, and Asics spent $3 million, and eight years – three more than it took the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bomb – to invent the awe-inspiring “Kinsei”, a shoe that boasts “multi-angled forefoot gel pods” and an “infinitely adaptable heel component”.
Astonishingly, there’s no evidence that any of this technology does anything, which may explain why Nike ads never explain what, exactly, those $190 shoes are supposed to do. In a 2008 research paper for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Dr Craig Richards, a physician at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed that after scouring 30 years’ worth of studies, he couldn’t find a single one that demonstrated that running shoes made you less prone to injury.
So if shoes aren’t the solution, could they be the problem? That’s what Dr Daniel Lieberman, the head of the evolutionary anthropology department at Harvard, began to wonder. Humans, after all, are the only creatures that voluntarily cover their feet, and we’re also the only creatures known to suffer from corns, bunions, hammer-toes and heel pain.
Last spring, Lieberman recruited Harvard students for an experiment: he had them kick off their sneakers and run every day in either bare feet or wearing a thin, rubber foot-glove called the Vibram Fivefingers. The results were remarkable. Once their shoes were taken away, the students instinctively stopped clumping down on their heels. Instead, they began landing lightly on the balls of their feet, keeping their feet beneath their hips and bending at the knees and ankles. Without knowing it, they were mirroring the Tarahumara.
Lieberman was so taken by his discovery that before long, he was startling undergraduates by loping past them in bare feet for miles at a time through the streets of suburban Boston.
In Germany, meanwhile, the world’s leading researcher in human connective tissue, Dr Robert Schleip at the University of Ulm, began a similar experiment to see whether he could end his own battle with plantar fasciitis, a vexing heel pain that is almost impossible to cure fully.
“If you encase the foot in thick shoes,” Schleip says, “you not only lose ground awareness, you limit your natural elasticity.” Schleip began slipping out of his shoes to run barefoot through the parks of Berlin. Soon, his heel pain vanished, never to return.
So harmful are running shoes that you’re better off walking in high heels. That’s the conclusion of a study published this month in PM&R, the journal for the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. A team of researchers put 68 young adult runners on a treadmill, and found that they suffered 38 per cent more twisting in their knees and ankles when wearing shoes than they did in bare feet.
“Remarkably, the effect of running shoes on knee joint torques,” the lead researcher said, “is even greater than the effect that was reported earlier of high-heeled shoes during walking.”
Similarly, a study in The Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness in March 2009 found that even when running on hard surfaces, barefoot runners experience less impact than runners with shoes because – as the Harvard students discovered – they naturally take shorter strides and bend their knees and ankles. No one needed to feed those numbers to Abebe Bikila, the two-time Olympic champion, or Zola Budd, who held the
5,000 metre world record and competed for Britain in the 1984 Los Angeles Games: both preferred running in bare feet.
The upstart of all this is that I tried it. For the first couple of days, I just walked barefoot on the golf course outside our home in Florida. I felt liberated and a little naughty – I’d never seen anyone walk barefoot on the golf course. Are you allowed? I didn’t know, but I didn’t care. It felt good. After the third day, I decided to do something even more daring. I decided to run. I had been reading about Tabata Sprints where one runs flat out as fast as he can for 20 seconds and then walks slowly for 10 seconds (repeated 8-10 times) and how great a cardio workout it is, so I decided to try it.
But instead of running for 20 seconds I decided to run from green to tee box on the 550 yard par 5 third hole and to time myself. I was scared to run all out, so I just jogged to the other end. It took me a little over 2 minutes. I walked back to where I had started to give my system a rest and then decided to do it again, only this time, to better my time.
I opened it up a bit and covered the same ground in 1:30. But I knew I had held something back. So the third time, I let it rip and flew down the course, legs churning, arms pumping. I felt like I was in one of my dreams. It was surreal. It felt fabulous. I covered the distance in 1:17. It was amazing. I didn’t want to stop. It was the most fabulous running experience of my life and I know I will do it again.
I haven’t had a chance to repeat that experience as we started traveling and the weather turned bitter cold, but I know I will. In fact, I can’t wait. Maybe one of these days you will see a blog entry from me entitled, I Was Born to Run. You never know.
(Check out these cool videos and websites. The first is the Attenborough film on Persistence Hunting and the second demonstrates how without instruction of any kind we instinctively change our running style from a “heel strike” to a “ball of feet” strike when we run barefoot. Both are fascinating.)
Websites to Visit for more information:
Vibram Five Fingers – An Alternative to Running “totally” Barefoot
Popular Mechanic’s Look at High Tech Shoes and the Benefits of Barefoot Running
Things I Am Learning 