Running out of your shoes

Lose the shoes if you want to rediscover the joys of running.

No more boring, thumping runs in shoes that weigh you down and handcuff your natural motion. Instead, you'll remember the days of your youth, when you ran fast, light air max men and pain free, with the grass tickling your toes. That's what it's like to run in bare feet.

At least, that's what I found during a summer of running barefoot a few times a week, and in barefoot style six days a week. Inspired by Christopher McDougall's New York Times bestseller Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (Random House, $29.95), in late June I decided to join the hottest and most controversial new running trend in years. I would test my sore knees and left hip with a 10 week barefoot running program created for me by running expert Eric Orton of Wyoming (see Gait guinea pig, on Page C7).

All I wanted to do was feel good during and after my runs, so I could get in shape and stay there. Running burns calories faster than just about every activity, works most of the body, and can be done just about anywhere. But pounding pavement in shoes is boring for most of us adults. Worse, nike air max 2014 anyone who runs regularly can expect to get injured from all the pounding our joints take as we plod along. Experts say the injury rate among runners is virtually unchanged from the 1970s, when the modern running shoe was introduced.

"Most runners get injured at least once a year," says Reed

Ferber, the founder of the Running Injury Clinic at the University of Calgary.

I was always taught to run heel to toe, but the new/old school theory of barefoot running style teaches that this causes injuries by sending the full force of each footfall up your joints. Barefoot runners choose to land instead on their mid foot, which turns your feet muscles and calves into shock absorbers, and nike air max 90 cheap shortens your stride. To keep up your speed, you just pick up your

cadence. Feet whirring along, you feel faster.

Sounds great, right? Except that none of the experts really know whether barefoot running saves runners from injuries, or just sets them up for new ones. Despite decades and millions of dollars worth of research spent trying to determine the best running shoe, scientists know squat about the oldest athletic activity out there.

"It's everyone's opinion right now," Ferber says.

There is great anecdotal evidence that barefoot running is the greatest thing before sliced bread. Nearly all of the world's best long distance runners come from East Africa, where most grew up running barefoot. While most long distance runners wear shoes in races, many train without them. Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila famously won the 1960 Olympic marathon in bare feet. In the '80s, South African native Zola Budd twice broke the world record in the women's 5,000 metres, and twice was the women's winner at the World Cross Country Championships. And the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico's Copper Canyon run

ultra marathon distances on rocky, steep trails in sandals made out of tire treads.

Barefoot advocates say shoes weaken your foot muscles, slow you down and contribute to

injuries by hiding the pain of landing on your heel without reducing the major impact caused by the heel first footfall. In fact, several footwear companies have come out with lines of minimal support shoes in the past few years, such as the Vibram FiveFingers, which are like gloves for your feet, and the Nike Frees.

But many in the running industry and the medical community contend it is safer to wear shoes that cushion the heavy impacts involved in running. They discount barefoot running converts such as "Barefoot Ted," a Seattle man who has run up to 160 kilometres in bare feet and regularly competes in marathons without shoes.

In an Aug. 30 article in the New York Times, Dr. Lewis G. Maharam, medical director for the group that organizes the New York City Marathon, told reporter Amy Cortese that "in 95 per cent of the population or higher, running barefoot will land you in my office." Maharam believes only a select few of us are blessed with perfect gait.

Running in bare feet is only natural, counter proponents of barefoot running. They argue some experts who deny the benefits of running without shoes are too well connected to the $17 billion a year global sports shoe industry. McDougall points out that running magazines have given little ink to reviews of his book, or discussion of the barefoot movement it seems to have invigorated.

Yet even those who tout the benefits of barefoot running disagree on how much time a runner should spend in bare feet versus running in barefoot style while wearing shoes (see the bare facts on shoeless running, on Page C7).

For a definitive answer to the question of whether the benefits of barefoot running outweigh the drawbacks, you'll have to wait a decade or two. But after 10 weeks of running almost daily in either bare feet or in barefoot style, all I know is my knees and hips feel great, my body is stronger and leaner, and I now look forward to running. It been almost 10 .

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