| Barefoot v Shoes – The Debate |
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'Nike', the shoe company recently changed its slogon to 'Run Barefoot'. Before that change the slogan was, 'Just do it'. Butt these two together, 'Run barefoot. Just do it' and it neatly sums up 25 years of seeking answers to the question. Is the human foot limited by wearing shoes? For me barefootin' is an experiment, an attempt to get an answer to a specific question – an experiment taking place in a laboratory of one: me. From the hazy, hippy days when I first formulated the question to now I have devised ways to find out more about the whole foot. I now have a sense that the habit of shoe-wearing limits the foot to well under 10% of its true capacity. This is not a statement of belief but the honest result of research done in my laboratory of one. You should be sceptical about this. You should check it out. Like the people who come on the Natural Running Courses, who are open-minded, sceptical, they want to find out for themselves. How? 'Run barefoot. Just do it'. There is currently an intense debate about barefoot versus shoes. Recently I was asked by a running magazine to contribute an article on barefoot explorations. When it appeared it was a pros and cons piece, with my contribution appearing in one page and a counter-argument from a podiatrist on the opposite page. The press love to polarise issues in this way. It is one way of establishing a degree of truth by putting two proponents onto the respective changes and letting them battle it out. May the best man win! But this is only one way to find out. Going with Nike: 'Run barefoot. Just do it', is for me preferable, but let's set up a continuum with the extreme statements from the debate at either end. As we do this we can rest assured that the truth will float around between the two ends of the spectrum and you may ultimately have to find out for yourself the Nike way. There are three issues this debate revolves around: Is the foot really insufficiently evolved and therefore inherently weak and vulnerable and in need of the support and protection of the shoes? Exactly what is it about shoes that may have limiting effects on the functioning of the human foot? How can we create a reliable baseline that can guide and help shoe-designers to enhance the functioning of the whole foot? Is the foot not up to it? Before we explore the polarities at either end of the barefoot vs shoes debate, I want to consider something we all agree about. We are a very adaptable species, a major part of our success story is that we are so damned clever. We've undergone a unique transformation. Our enormously souped-up bio-computer of a brain has a capacity other animal brains do not have. This capacity enables us to change the world instead of the world changing us. So, we put on protective kit as the climate gets colder leaving the rest of the animal kingdom to survive by growing more fur and thicker protective fat layers. We make warm clothes to thrive in cold climates. We make protective gear to put on our feet to get us over terrain that would otherwise hobble us. It is our cleverness that gives us the edge. This is beyond contention. But let's lead this into a statement of the far end of the continuum. The foot is a failure of evolutionary development. This doesn't matter because we more than compensate for the weakness and vulnerability by our cleverness in making shoes to protect the foot. On this basis it's just plain stupid to go without shoes and to do so flies in the face of what has made us the evolutionary success story that we are. To do so puts us back in evolutionary time which wouldn't be very clever. It's the cleverness that's given us the edge so stay within the safety and cleverness of your trainers! Now visit the other end of the spectrum: All shoes are crippling the foot, they are an unnatural encumbrance, as destructive to inner balance and ecology as the continued destruction of the rainforest is to the ecology of the earth. We need to get back to Nature and burn all tourshoes. The smell of burning books by the Third Reich. The smell of burning bras by the 1970 feminists. The smell of the piles of burning shoes. It's really the stench of ideology. We could let these two extremes of the spectrum battle it out and when the blood and snot has subsided we could raise the hand of the victor. It's a limited way of sorting out the truth and one that creates, entrenched views and stuckness. It's simply not that effective in establishing what lies in between the two extremes. There is something else that gives our species an edge: We pass around the results of our experience. It's called culture. If something works well we pass it down the generations. A blossoming of that stored repository of knowledge is what we call science. For me the Nike way 'Run barefoot. Just do it', is a key way to find out for yourself, in your own experience but we might reasonably ask, what can science offer to the question, 'Is the foot insufficiently evolved and in need of protection and support in order to survive'? The science of archaeology in its nature tends to deliver best guesses. From what archaeology can tell us for sure, our species homo-sapiens-sapiens has been around for 2.4 million years. Carbon dating fossil remains means we can be reasonably sure of 2.4 million, though it's probably longer. I like to think of this as a book, an encyclopedia of 'The Human Story' that has 2.400 pages representing 2.4 million years. The immediate problem is that the Nike factory evolves far too late on and in fact only appears in the book in the second to the last word. Going a bit further back in the book, we become 'civilised' in the final ten page chapter. Our day to day survival must have been very different during the 2,390 pages of pre-history. How did we get by without our Nikes? For sure we'd be clever, we'd co-operate, we'd share and refine our skills over generations. But what would we have on our feet when, for millions of years we ran down the final kill, or fled away from the ferocious predator who scared us away and stole the kill. Archaeology is largely silent in answer to such a question. Things we may have fashioned to put on our feet are very unlikely to crop up in the fossil record. Bones however do occur and the expert eyes of the Paleontologist can identify very easily whether a foot bone came from a shod or an unshod individual. The evidence for the human foot as a dismal failure of evolution simply does not hold up here. If we were hobbling along on stumps evolving toward the Nike Factory we survived an unconscionably long period of time. Evolution wouldn't allow us to get that lucky. No doubt the first footwear was literally a second skin and so very unlikely to appear in the fossil record. But, interestingly also unlikely to show up in a fossil foot bone, if the second skin shoe did not have the limiting effects of the modern shoes. We may have much to learn from 'the second skin' shoe of our clever ancient ancestors because inside it was a fully functioning foot that remains a triumph and not a failure of evolution. This seems to be the best guess from archaeology. Archaeology unfolds an extra-ordinary adventure story in the last chapter of 'The Human Story'. It's the epic tale of the final extinction of the Neanderthal species. Very close cousins to us, the Neanderthal were, as the latest best guesses of archaeology suggest, much heavier, far stronger and maybe even a lot brighter and more intelligent than the species Homo-sapiens-sapiens. For millennia the Neanderthals lived 'a balanced relationship' by trapping, quite literally Big Game. Huge creatures like the Hairy Mammoth were in plentiful supply until, that is the coming of Global warming. As the ice melts and the easy sources of protein disappear, with the sunshine come us, the opportunistic Running People. We move in from the warmer climes, fleet of foot and with a slim window of advantage: we run down Small game. That we were dependent on the equivalent of the Nike Factory to achieve this route of the Neanderthals seems a most highly unlikely hypothesis. There is also little support for 'the foot as a failure of evolution' notion from the science of anthropology. Here the evidence is more direct. There is an opportunity to study the rapidly dwindling number of human cultures in which shoes have never been worn. Do they run and hunt successfully? Do they survive? Social anthropology offers a special opportunity to actually see the way that our ancient ancestors moved and most of all to listen very carefully to what they say about the way we move. The Tarahumaran Indians were very direct about this and named us in their own language, 'The race that cannot walk straight'. The evidence from archaeology and anthropology and the evidence from the Nike Way (the laboratory of one) to say nothing of recent findings from sports science give very little sound support for the notion that the foot is not up to it. So at what point did we start to do things that limit the functioning of the foot? Why would we do this and what are the ramifications? Is what we get from limiting the foot worth the price we pay in terms of foot and joint problems, misalignments and imbalances in the head-to-toes posture and further hidden knock-on health issues? Do we need to pay the price? Do we know exactly the cost? |
Twenty five years ago I started going barefoot. Back then it was a free and hippy sort of thing. After being barefoot through the Summer of Love my feet spread. They seemed to become trapped outside of a shoe. Putting my feet back into a shoe became increasingly uncomfortable. At that time I had also been exploring various ideas about human movement. So after drifting into barefootin' in a flower-power haze I started to ponder: Are we really using the whole of the foot? If we are not engaging the whole foot then surely we are not fully using the whole head-to-toe length of the body. After all the foot is the foundation of the standing, walking, running body. If the foot is limited, exactly how does this compromise the rest of the body. I started seriously exploring these issues by going deeper into my barefoot experiences.