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After a year of romance with Jenn, he’d learned she was capable of absolutely anything except moderation. Even when she wanted to rein herself in, whatever was building inside her—passion, inspiration, aggravation, hilarity—inevitably came fire-hosing out. After all, this was a woman who joined the UNC rugby team and set a standard considered previously unachievable throughout the sport’s one-hundred-seventy-year history: Too Wild for Rugby Parties. “She’d get so nuts, guys on the men’s team would wrestle her down and carry her back to her room,”
Jenn didn’t just finish; she was the second runner overall and the fastest woman to ever run the course, breaking the old record by three hours (to this day, her 17:34 record still stands).
That fall, a photo appeared in UltraRunning magazine. It shows Jenn finishing a 30-mile race somewhere in the backwoods of Virginia. There’s nothing amazing about her performance (third place), or her getup (basic black shorts, basic black sports bra), or even the camera work (dimly lit, crudely cropped). Jenn isn’t battling a rival to the bitter end, or striding across a mountaintop with the steel-jawed majesty of a Nike model, or gasping toward glory with a grimace of heartbreaking determination. All she’s doing is … running. Running, and smiling. But that smile is strangely stirring. You
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“I never really discussed this with anyone because it sounds pretentious, but I started running ultras to become a better person,” Jenn told me. “I thought if you could run one hundred miles, you’d be in this Zen state. You’d be the fucking Buddha, bringing peace and a smile to the world. It didn’t work in my case—I’m the same old punk-ass as before—but there’s always that hope that it will turn you into the person you want to be, a better, more peaceful person.
“When I’m out on a long run,” she continued, “the only thing in life that matters is finishing the run. For once, my brain isn’t going blehblehbleh all the time. Everything quiets down, and the only thing going on is pure flow. It’s just me and the movement and the motion. That’s what I love—just being a barbarian, running through the woods.”
Running shoes have only been around about as long as the space shuttle; before that, your dad wore flat rubber gym shoes and your granddad was in leather ballet slippers. For millions of years, humans ran without arch support, pronation control, or gel-filled pods under their heels.
So he gulped hard and sent three hundred dollars to Switzerland for a pair of Kangoo Jumps, the springiest shoes in the world. Kangoos are basically Rollerblades as designed by Wile E. Coyote: instead of wheels, each boot sits atop a full-length steel-spring suspension that lets you boing along like you’re in a Moon bounce.
Ted stumbled across an international community of barefoot runners, complete with their own ancient wisdom and tribal nicknames and led by their great bearded sage, “Barefoot Ken Bob” Saxton. And luckily, this was one tribe that loved to write. Ted
He discovered that Leonardo da Vinci considered the human foot, with its fantastic weight-suspension system comprising one quarter of all the bones in the human body, “a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.”
“Many of you may be suffering from chronic running related injuries,” Barefoot Ken Bob begins: Shoes block pain, not impact! Pain teaches us to run comfortably! From the moment you start going barefoot, you will change the way you run.
All that cushioning underfoot let him run with big, sloppy strides, which twisted and tweaked his lower back. When he went barefoot, his form instantly tightened; his back straightened and his legs stayed squarely under his hips.
“No wonder your feet are so sensitive,” Ted mused. “They’re self-correcting devices. Covering your feet with cushioned shoes is like turning off your smoke alarms.”
Whenever he hit gravel and broken glass, he yanked on rubber foot gloves called the Vibram FiveFingers and kept going.
“I went for an easy little one-mile jog,” he says. “I ended up doing seven. I’d never thought of the FiveFinger as a running shoe, but after that, I never thought of anything else as a running shoe.”
Ted was saying. “This concept of bricolage—that less is more, the best solution is the most elegant. Why add something if you’re born with everything you need?”
Lost in all the fireworks between Ted and Caballo was an important point: running shoes may be the most destructive force to ever hit the human foot.
Until 1972, when the modern athletic shoe was invented by Nike, people ran in very
thin-soled shoes, had strong feet, and had much lower incidence of knee injuries.”
“If there’s any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it’s to run.”
If running shoes never existed, he was saying, more people would be running. If more people ran, fewer would be dying of degenerative heart disease, sudden cardiac arrest, hypertension, blocked arteries, diabetes, and most other deadly ailments of the Western world.
That’s a staggering amount of guilt to lay at Nike’s feet. But the most remarkable part? There’s a good chance that Nike already knew it.
“I know as a shoe company, it’s not the greatest thing to have a sponsored team not use your product, but people went thousands of years without shoes. I think you try to do all these corrective things with shoes and you overcompensate. You fix things that don’t need fixing. If you strengthen the foot by going barefoot, I think you reduce the risk of Achilles and knee and plantar fascia problems.”
In a 2008 research paper for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Dr. Craig Richards, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed that there are no evidence-based studies—not one—that demonstrate that running shoes make you less prone to injury.
PAINFUL TRUTH No. 1: The Best Shoes Are the Worst
RUNNERS wearing top-of-the-line shoes are 123 percent more likely to get injured than runners in cheap shoes, according to a study led by Bernard Marti, M.D., a preventative-medicine specialist at Switzerland’s University of Bern.
PAINFUL TRUTH No. 2: Feet Like a Good Beating
The puzzling conclusion: the more cushioned the shoe, the less protection it provides.
your legs and feet instinctively come down hard when they sense something squishy underfoot. When you run in cushioned shoes, your feet are pushing through the soles in search of a hard, stable platform.
FINAL PAINFUL TRUTH: Even Alan Webb Says “Human Beings Are Designed to Run Without Shoes”
“Pronation has become this very bad word, but it’s just the natural movement of the foot. The foot is supposed to pronate.”
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.
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).
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
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“Putting your feet in shoes is similar to putting them in a plaster cast,” 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...
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To this day, 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.”
“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.”
The company was founded by Phil Knight, a University of Oregon runner who could sell anything, and Bill Bowerman, the University of Oregon coach who thought he knew everything. Before these two men got together, the modern running shoe didn’t exist. Neither did most modern running injuries, according to Arthur Lydiard, one of the sport’s greatest thinkers.
For a guy who told so many people how to run, Bowerman didn’t do much of it himself. He only started to jog a little at age fifty,
But he came home a convert, and soon penned a best-selling book whose one-word title introduced a new word and obsession to the American public: Jogging.
Bowerman’s deftest move was advocating a new style of running that was only possible in his new style of shoe. The Cortez allowed people to run in a way no human safely could before: by landing on their bony heels. Before the invention of a cushioned shoe, runners through the ages had identical form: Jesse Owens, Roger Bannister, Frank Shorter, and even Emil Zatopek all ran with backs straight, knees bent, feet scratching back under their hips.
In fact, when the biomedical designer Van Phillips created a state-of-the-art prosthetic for amputee runners in 1984, he didn’t even bother equipping it with a heel. As a runner who lost his left leg below the knee in a water-skiing accident, Phillips understood that the heel was needed only for standing, not motion. Phillips’s C-shaped “Cheetah foot” mimics the performance of an organic leg so effectively, it allowed the South African double amputee Oscar Pistorius to compete with the world’s greatest sprinters.
Bowerman’s marketing was brilliant. “The same man created a market for a product and then created the product itself,” as one Oregon financial columnist observed. “It’s genius, the kind of stuff they study in business schools.”
“We ran in canvas shoes,” Lydiard went on. “We didn’t get plantar fascia, we didn’t pronate or supinate, we might have lost a bit of skin from the rough canvas when we were running marathons, but, generally speaking, we didn’t have foot problems. Paying several hundred dollars for the latest in high-tech running shoes is no guarantee you’ll avoid any of these injuries and can even guarantee that you will suffer from them in one form or another.”
Bowerman felt his original mission of making an honest shoe had been eroded by a new ideology, which he summed up in two words: “Make money.” Nike, he griped in a letter to a colleague, was “distributing a lot of crap.” Even to one of Nike’s founding partners, it seemed, the words of the social critic Eric Hoffer were ringing true: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.”
Nike followed up that blast with its own hard data. Jeff Pisciotta, the senior researcher at Nike Sports Research Lab, assembled twenty runners on a grassy field and filmed them running barefoot. When he zoomed in, he was startled by what he found: instead of each foot clomping down as it would in a shoe, it behaved like an animal with a mind of its own—stretching, grasping, seeking the ground with splayed toes, gliding in for a landing like a lake-bound swan.
It’s the new Nike Free, a swooshed slipper even thinner than the old Cortez. And its slogan?
Because of his long friendship with Patricio, Bob is one of the only Americans to have ever attended a Tarahumara tesgüinada— the marathon drinking party that precedes and occasionally prevents the ball races. Even Caballo hasn’t reached that level of trust with the Tarahumara, and after listening to Bob’s stories, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
“All of a sudden, Tarahumara I’ve been friends with for years, guys I knew as shy, gentle amigos, are in my face, butting against me with their chests, spitting insults at me, ready to fight,” Bob said. “Meanwhile, their wives are in the bushes with other men, and their grown-up daughters are wrestling naked. They keep the kids away from these deals; you can imagine why.” Anything goes at a tesgüinada,
As wild as these parties get, they actually serve a noble and sober purpose: they act as a pressure valve to vent explosive emotions.
Eric and I eased back to a walk, obeying the ultrarunner’s creed: “If you can’t see the top, walk.” When you’re running fifty miles, there’s no dividend in bashing up the hills and then being winded on the way down; you only lose a few seconds if you walk, and then you can make them back up by flying downhill. Eric believes that’s one reason ultrarunners don’t get hurt and never seem to burn out: “They know how to train, not strain.”
