Wired has an interesting story on barefoot running (hat tip to Gene Expression), with some special commentary from Mr. Long-Distance Running himself, Daniel Lieberman. The article encourages people to cast off their thick-soled athletic shoes for a more natural alternative: Going barefoot, or at least nearly so.
Running is a type of locomotion in which the animal has all of their feet off of the ground at the same time. In humans – the bipedal apes – this consists of a fancy jump from one leg to the other in a forward direction. As with walking, you can divide your gait into two main phases: Stride and stance. Stride is when your foot is up in the air, and stance is when it’s on the ground. The stance phase is usually the one we’re worried about, because that’s when the foot hits the ground, and it determines how your foot leaves the ground as well.
Normally, when we run in our running shoes, we hit the ground with our heels. Our shoes are designed to withstand all of the impact from that contact (which is something like 2-3x body weight!). Sounds good! The less impact on my bones, the better! However, the barefoot running people are claiming that this is making our strides too long, and our feet too lazy. A more natural pattern is to hit the ground with the lateral side of your feet, and then let your weight roll inward. This way, our arches get to extend and flex transversely and longitudinally the way they like to, instead of just on the transverse plane.
Our feet are designed this way, says Lieberman, because our ancestors were persistence hunters, much like the !Kung (video of a persistence hunt). The article says,
He’s sure that running barefoot or with minimal footwear is the way to avoid injury. After all, we evolved without shoes.
“If a third of runners had gotten injured in the Paleolithic with runner’s knee or plantar fasciitis, you can bet that natural selection would have weeded them out,” Lieberman says.
Right. We’ve spent long stints of our evolution doing lots of different things though. I mean, we evolved without clothing of any kind for a pretty long time. But I’m not going to outside on a chilly day without my jacket, and I wouldn’t go out persistence hunting without my SPF 45 sunscreen, even though humans evolved without them! Perhaps that’s an unfair analogy, since skin pigment is probably a more labile trait than foot morphology, but I still don’t think that we should swear off modern technology because we evolved without it. And perhaps natural selection did weed out the guys with runner’s knee, and the ones who couldn’t keep up were left for dead on the Paloelithic Plains. That left us modern humans with a population of flexible-footed, midfoot-strikers. Or maybe they stayed at home waiting for it to heal, and that’s how a division of labor was born! Or maybe humans just aren’t particularly well-adapted for running because very few of us have ever incorporated regular endurance running into our repertoires. Perhaps there were a few elite hunters in a few populations who had adopted persistence hunting as a means to acquire supplemental protein, but my guess is that walking was the way to get around in the Paleolithic.
Either way, I’m usually very cautious about shaping my lifestyle to fit the needs of a paleolithic savannah-scape. We’ve done a lot of evolving since then, after all! If I push my lifestyle back to the Paleolithic, then who’s to say that I’m not even BETTER evolved for the Pliocene?
Reed Ferber shares at least a little of my skepticism:
Ferber is more cautious. His studies of the biomechanics of running show that a midfoot strike does reduce the initial peak loading force — the impact in the first 25 milliseconds after your foot touches the ground. But your foot sustains a second peak load of three times your body weight about 100 milliseconds later, regardless of whether you’re a heel-first or midfoot-first runner.
So, if either of those peaks was a selective force, why select against one and not the other? Is it just that we’re anatomically committed to that second peak, while we could play around a little with the first one? I can see that, I guess.
I think lots of people probably need better running shoes, and if those goofy toe-shoes work for some people, then they should have them! But I also think that it’s wise to keep in mind that the average life span in the paleolithic was much shorter than it is now, and bad knees and arthritis might be a sign of subjecting our bodies to decades more wear and tear than they evolved to withstand. We’re committed to having skeletons, which, remarkable as they are, do show some wear and tear after awhile. Our bodies are laid out in such a way that we are able to engage in a wide variety of activities with very few catastrophic consequences, but any activity, no matter how flawlessly performed, is going to leave a mark at some point. Humans have never been perfectly adapted to an environment or a particular lifestyle. Evolution just doesn’t work that way.
Just a thought. Even if we are evolved to be Paleolithic runners. Very few Paleolithic runners ran on paved surfaces. Dirt, sand or grass are all much softer surfaces than most runners have. When was the last marathon run on a grass, dirt or sand surface? Maybe during the time of the Greek games.
I know from running on the beach that hard sand is a very comfortable surface to run on barefoot.
[...] among contemporary runners has led to a series of articles on the benefits of running barefoot. Zinjanthropus throws a bit of cold water on this particular brand of ‘paleo-nostalgia.’ (I’ve got a longer post on the ‘throw out [...]
[...] about shoes and foot health? Is there anyone out there preaching the Paleolithic Podiatry program? Zinjanthropus shares my scepticism of podiatric paleo-nostalgia, asking why one period of our evolutionary history is privileged over [...]
I am on the verge of purchasing a vibram 5. I was always intrigued how i could run without protection on my uber precious feet.
I need cushion running shoes, the most cushioned ones. Without them even walking kills my knees and shins.