When I was a young boy my mother often scolded me because I had the habit of ditching my slippers whenever I played outside. I think I was just more comfortable unshod, and I may have felt a little faster than my friends who I thought were actually hampered by their flip-flops flip-flopping as they ran.
I eventually outgrew the habit of running barefoot, and according to my youngest brother, I was even a little OC about wearing slippers inside the house. And as far as I can remember, I have never ventured outside the house without shoes or slippers. But now, 40-plus years later, I am coming full circle.
As it turns out, I was right about going barefoot.
Too weird
My first encounter with barefooting (the term coined for the barefoot lifestyle, covering both running and walking) was in 1983 when I visited a college friend at his home. He was going around barefoot, even in the yard, and he said his doctor-brother had told him it was healthy and that it was what God designed our feet for. “Yes,” I replied rather smugly, “but only for grass. Not for pavements.” He gave some explanations about how the toes, the arches, and the heels were made to hit the ground in a natural way, but I completely ignored him. It just sounded too weird for me.
My second encounter was last May when a friend from Cebu posted in his Facebook status that he wanted to try barefoot running. “Ouch, that must hurt,” I thought. But I was intrigued and remembered my college friend, so I googled it. As I soon found out, barefoot running not only does not hurt, it is also the best way to run. It is, as my college friend said, what God designed our feet to do.
Now by this time I had already tried running twice and brisk-walking once, and in all three times I ended up with heel, knee, and lower back pain. I didn’t know it then, but I had injured myself not because of running and brisk-walking per se but with the way I was doing it.
Like most people, I ran and walked with my heels hitting the ground first, followed by the rest of the feet, ending up with the toes. I had little choice on the matter: heel strike is literally forced on us by the modern running shoe, which is designed with the heel as the biggest part. According to a study done by a team from Harvard University, this high heel “makes it easier to heel strike because the sole below the heel is typically about twice as thick as the sole below the forefoot. So if your foot would tend to land flat when barefoot, it will land on the heel when in a shoe.”
A new way to walk/run
But the same study says landing on the heels when we run subjects our body to up to three times our body weight. This, the study says, is equivalent to “someone hitting you on the heel with a hammer using 1.5 to as much as 3 times your body weight. These impacts add up, since you strike the ground almost 1000 times per mile!” Now imagine what that impact does to your back, knees, and the rest of your body.
So how should we run? According to the study – and to many other people, including my college friend, who discovered it way before these Harvard types did – we must run with a forefoot or midfoot strike, the kind of stride we do when we run barefoot. The Harvard study says this kind of collision “produces a very slow rise in force with no distinct impact transient. There is ESSENTIALLY NO IMPACT TRANSIENT (highlight theirs) in a forefoot strike. The same is true of some (but not all) midfoot strikes.”
I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of it (just read that Harvard study), but let me just say that running this way has opened up a whole new world for me. I had already given up on running (and brisk-walking) after injuring myself; now I am running again, and except for a few minor setbacks when previous injuries flared up again, I am doing it pain-free. I have, to borrow from Sesame Street, found “a new way to walk (and run).”
Hardly strictly barefoot
Of course when I say barefoot I don’t mean it in the strict sense: sometimes I run barefoot, but most other times I use footwear that allows me to run as if I were barefoot, with the benefit of having my feet protected from nasty things that find their way to the streets, like broken glass, nails, and other stuff that can do serious damage.
Me and my VFFs -- Vest Friends Forever? 
The first such footwear I bought was a pair of Adidas beach shoes, which was OK for forefoot and midfoot running but didn’t give me a barefoot feel. The next pair was the Vibram Fivefingers, a rather weird-looking glove-for-the-feet that does, in fact, allow the runner to run barefoot without running barefoot. My VFFs are now a constant companion (Vest Friends Forever?), always in my bag in case I have the chance to run at the end of the day.
Don’t get me wrong, though – I’m still just a beginner as a runner and can’t really call myself a runner yet. But I’m getting there, and I’m getting there faster and better than I did in my first two tries.
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Interesting article, Jon! And those VFFs look really neat. Where’d you get those?
hey blogie. there’s a vff outlet at the powerplant mall in rockwell. i’m going to write a followup to this article, one on transitioning to the vff.