Final painful truth: Even Alan Webb Says "Human Beings Are Designed to Run Without Shoes"
Before Alan Webb became America's greatest miler, he was a flatfooted frosh with awful form. But his high school coach saw potential, and began rebuilding Alan from - no exaggeration - the ground up.
"I had injury problems early on, and it became apparent that my biomechanics could cause injury," Webb told me. "So we did foot-strengthening drills and special walks in bare feet." Bit by bit, Webb watched his feet transform before his eyes. "I was a size twelve and flat-footed, and now I'm a nine or ten. As the muscles in my feet got stronger, my arch got higher." Because of the barefoot drills, Webb also cut down on his injuries, allowing him to handle the kind of heavy training that would lead to his U.S. record for the mile and the fastest 1,500-meter time in the world for the year 2007
"Barefoot running has been one of my training philosophies for years," said Gerard Hartmann, Ph.D., the Irish physical therapist who serves as the Great and Powerful Oz for the world's finest distance runners. Paula Radcliffe never runs a marathon without seeing Dr. Hartmann first, and titans like Haile Gebrselassie and Khalid Khannouchi have trusted their feet to his hands. For decades, Dr. Hartmann has been watching the explosion of orthotics and evermore-structured running shoes with dismay.
"The deconditioned musculature of the foot is the greatest issue leading to injury, and we've allowed our feet to become badly deconditioned over the past twenty-five years," Dr. Hartmann said. "Pronation has become this very bad word, but it's just the natural movement of the foot. The foot is SUPPOSED to pronate."
To see pronation in action, kick off your shoes and run down the driveway. On a hard surface, your feet will briefly unlearn the habits they picked up in shoes and automatically shift to self-defense mode: you'll find yourself landing on the outside edge of your foot, then gently rolling from little toe over to big until your foot is flat. That's pronation - just a mild, shock-absorbing twist that allows your arch to compress.
But back in the '70s, the most respected voice in running began expressing some doubts about all that foot twisting. Dr. George Sheehan was a cardiologist whose essays on the beauty of running had made him the philosopher-king of the marathon set, and he came up with the notion that excessive pronation might be the cause of runner's knee. He was both right and very, very wrong. You have to land on your heel to overpronate, and you can only land on your heel if it's cushioned. Nevertheless, the shoe companies were quick to respond to Dr. Sheehan's call to arms and carne up with a nuclear response; they created monstrously wedged and super-engineered shoes that wiped out virtually all pronation.
"But once you block a natural movement," Dr. Hartmann said, "you adversely affect the others. We've done studies, and only two to three percent of the population has real biomechanical problems. So who is getting all these orthotics? Every time we put someone in a corrective device, we're creating new problems by treating ones that don't exist." In a startling admission in 2008, Runner's World confessed that for years it had accidentally misled its readers by recommending corrective shoes for runners with plantar fasciitis: "But recent research has shown stability shoes are unlikely to relieve plantar fasciitis and MAY EVEN EXACERBATE THE SYMPTOMS" (italics mine).
"Just look at the architecture," Dr. Hartmann explained. Blueprint your feet, and you'll find a marvel that engineers have been trying to match for centuries. Your foot's centerpiece is the arch, the greatest weight-bearing design ever created. The beauty of any arch is the way it gets stronger under stress; the harder you push down, the tighter its parts mesh. No stonemason worth his trowel would ever stick a support under an arch; push up from underneath, and you weaken the whole structure. Buttressing the foot's arch from all sides is a high-tensile web of twenty-six bones, thirty-three joints, twelve rubbery tendons, and eighteen muscles, all stretching and flexing like an earthquake-resistant suspension bridge.
"Putting your feet in shoes is similar to putting them in a plaster cast," Dr. Hartmann said. "If I put your leg in plaster, we'll find forty to sixty percent atrophy of the musculature within six weeks. Something similar happens to your feet when they're encased in shoes." When shoes are doing the work, tendons stiffen and muscles shrivel. Feet live for a fight and thrive under pressure; let them laze around, as Alan Webb discovered, and they'll collapse. Work them out, and they'll arc up like a rainbow.
"I've worked with over a hundred of the best Kenyan runners, and one thing they have in common is marvelous elasticity in their feet," Dr. Hartmann continued. "That comes from never running in shoes until you're seventeen." To this day, Dr. Hartmann believes that the best injury-prevention advice he's ever heard came from a coach who advocated "running barefoot on dewy grass three times a week."
He's not the only medical professional preaching the Barefoot Doctrine. According to Dr. Paul W. Brand, chief of rehab at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Carville, Louisiana, and a professor of surgery at Louisiana State University Medical School, we could wipe out every common foot ailment within a generation by kicking off our shoes. As far back as 1976, Dr. Brand was pointing out that nearly every case in his waiting room - corns, bunions, hammertoes, flat feet, fallen arches - was nearly nonexistent in countries where most people go barefoot.
"The barefoot walker receives a continuous stream of information about the ground and about his own relationship to it," Dr. Brand has said, "while a shod foot sleeps inside an unchanging environment."
**
Drumbeats for the barefoot uprising were growing. But instead of doctors leading the charge for a muscular foot, it was turning into a class war pitting podiatrists against their own patients. Barefoot advocates like Drs. Brand and Hartmann were still rare, while traditional podiatric thinking still saw human feet as Nature's Mistake, a work in progress that could always be improved by a little scalpel-sculpting and orthotic reshaping.
That born-broken mentality found its perfect expression in The Runners' Repair Manual. Written by Dr. Murray Weisenfeld, a leading sports podiatrist, it's one of the top-selling foot-care books of all time, and begins with this dire pronouncement:
Christopher McDougal "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen" (2009)
