Barefoot Media Wave

So barefoot running is enjoying a bit of media wave at the moment. 

In fact, according to this New York Times blog post, barefoot running is actually now "trendy."  Or, at least, "as trendy as any millenia-old activity can be." 

Wow, how did I go from freakish to trendy practically overnight? 

Of course, the answer is Christopher McDougal's best-selling book Born to Run (a phrase I used myself a few years ago to close out an April 08 post here on one of what become the major theses of the book - that humans are evolved for endurance running).  The barefoot running idea has always percolated through the media - there have always been a slow trickle of stories on the subject since I've been barefooting - but now it's a flash flood. 

One of the best pieces I've seen is this other NYT blog piece with accompanying video, which gives McDougal a chance to really concisely lay out the rationale for running barefoot.  In McDougal, the barefoot running community has really gotten a top-flight spokesperson for the cause.

The only caveat I would add to that piece is, I hope nobody out there tries kicking off their shoes and just setting off on a 6-mile run like the NYT guy did – not sure how he got away with it but most people if they are even able to do so they WILL get blisters at a minimum as well as wicked calf soreness (which is usually felt some by first-time barefooters as the achilles is stretched out in absence of high-heeled shoes).

Other recent media include this so-so business story that actually ran in the printed NY Times, and this very good, widely reprinted story in the Baltimore Sun story. This is one of the few articles that fails to feature the obligatory quote from a podiatrist pulling some assertion out of thin air about the harm that barefooting will do. One thing I would correct is that running barefoot does not create calluses, just thick, soft but tough skin (like a dog’s paw).

McDougal's book, to which we owe all this fuss, is a hoot. It actually has very little directly and explicitly on barefoot running - rather it tells a story and sets a context within which barefooting looks not "quirky" (to quote NYT article) but a perfectly natural and sensible thing to do. It is part travelogue, part "great race" story and part meditation on the meaning of running. If you are a runner at all it will inspire you and if you're not it it probably will make you want to be one. At times I was conscious of being in the presence of a *storyteller* in the good and bad senses - not someone who makes things up but someone who definitely knows how to sharpen and highlight and dramatize reality in the stories he tells. I had McDougall pinned as a gregarious British reporter type in the tabloid tradition (I was wrong; he is American). But it is also a rip-roaring narrative, fueled by genuine passion and amazement - an amazement that many barefoot runners have experienced when they realized that they'd been lied to by our culture and just what their bodies are capable of.  Realizing you don't need shoes is kind of like realizing one day that you can fly.

Many people who read Born To Run will come away with a new appreciation for barefoot and minimal-footwear running. For me, a lot of the concepts in the book were familiar ground, and the main takeaway for me was to its theme that running should be approached with joy and abandon, and not like some grim discipline, eating our wheaties and grinding out miles on suburban sidewalks according to rigid formulaic "training plans."  After I read this book I starting doing more trail runs, and worrying less about my pace and my distance and just going out and running.  That message is a whole other form of liberation on top of the shoe-liberation, and for that I am grateful to McDougal. Trendy or not.

Of course, the trendiness declaration is probably premature. I have noticed, as I mentioned after the Savageman triathlon, that fewer people think I'm totally nuts when they see me running around barefoot. But, on the other hand, outside of a few New York Times readers and fitness enthusiasts who have noticed this coverage, I think most Americans still think it's pretty freakish.

But, eventually, in a few years when a third of everybody at every local race is barefoot, I expect I will feel like the guys who used to be fans of U2 when they were playing in small clubs, or something like that.  Glad that the world finally gets it, but missing the fun of being cutting edge and, to be honest, the charge that comes from feeling one is possession of an esoteric truth. 

Comments

[Zataod]

I've also noticed this media wave, but I still doubt that people are ready to give up their love of shoes. People like to live with the belief that they can still buy happiness with a swipe of their credit card.