Barefoot Inspiration and Review of the Vibram Five Fingers

I forgot to say that the book Born to Run was a big inspiration to me as was the book Chi Running. Chi Running focuses on correct running form, Born to Run focuses on, well, everything else. Whilst Chi Runnng is a sort of technical running guide, Born to Run is the archetypal un-put-down-able page turner. What what quickly focused my attention in Born to Run in particular was the passage on page 40 about Carlos Castaneda. In the past I was very much into Castaneda as an undergraduate student, reading and researching his work in hopes to explore that tribal art work and textile designs of native peoples were some sort of vision from Non-Ordinary Reality. The idea got me as far as the start of an M.A. but I took it no further. One of the reasons was that I realised that Casteneda was a total fraud. But the interest, however counter-intuitive to my academic sensibilities remained, and although Casteneda is a very dubious figure both as an anthropologist and as a new age guru, I found it intriguing that the author Craig McDougall had stated that the Indian Nagual or shaman that mentored Castaneda, the Yaqui Indian Juan Matus, was not a Yaqui Indian at all but a Tarahumara (Raramuri), the supposed tribe of Super-athletes that can run 100 miles for fun in sandals (and blouses and skirts) and who are the subject of the book. This re-ignited my interest in Shamanism in general and the full potential of barefoot running and made me feel compelled to one day re-read Castaneda's compendious oeuvre. 

With Born to Run McDougall, a journalist, with that Journalist's gift of writing short concise paragraphs and page turning chapters suddenly made running, and barefoot running, and running  fifty miles cool, as cool as surfing with a new sort of philosophy and a cool but weird (and ultimately tragic) proponent in the eccentric late Caballo Blanco, a sort of long distance running Don Juan for the 21st century. It is damn alluring, long distance running in sandals and so is the book and highly recommended.

Of course running properly and injury free is damn difficult and the book romanticizes just about everything the author talks about, but that (I suppose) is what a good book is and what a good writer does. Nevertheless it (the book that is) was ( and still is) the main impetus (and inspiration) behind the whole  barefoot running thing which has been about for nearly ten years and me, well, I have just latched on to the back end of the fad. (There is a film coming out called Run Free which will further this cresting wave of barefootedness)

Review of Vibram Five Fingers KSO (2015).
The Vibrams are out of the box and on my feet! According to the accompanying literature you are supposed to not even run in the five fingers for the first two weeks but strengthen your feet by walking barefoot. I was going to leave four weeks before gradually phasing in the "barefoot" running with the Vibrams, but something happened with those Puma Mobiums. First of all, I should point out that I bought the Mobiums mid 2013 and used them for about six months before I went through a bout of illness and stopped running for a year. Even then the Mobiums were uncomfortable particularly in the arch, as if some one was poking something up into the arch of the foot and after a couple of miles I found my feet started to go numb. Fast-forward a year and I find that the Mobiums are still giving the same pain and numb feet, to the point that when I finish a run the discomfort is such that I cant wait to take my shoes off. I also started to get that shin splints feeling along with a pain in my left ankle. Having had (in the past) gait analysis and a string of expensive running shoes I decided rather than to seek "professional" advice (which I have learnt to distrust) to instead listen to my own intuition. It is for this reason that half way into week 3 I threw caution to the wind and took the Vibram Five Fingers (VFF) out for a spin. It was very icy and cold and with snow on the ground, and I had to calculate a run which was ten percent of my usual route which was stipulated in the literature (Vibrams have been successfully sued in America for misleading claims.)

Finding a route short enough was difficult so I just ran around the block. Immediately I found the pain in my left ankle start to ease along with the shin splints feeling and I felt none of the foot arch pain associated with the Mobiums. This was interesting because the Mobiums are neutral runners with minimum cushioning and the VFF are basically gloves with a bit of rubber on the bottom. It was not logical. I remember the last time I had an injury (in 2011) I packed extra insoles into my Brooks to make them more cushioned (and they were pretty well cushioned to start with) only to find it made it worse and here, by taking the cushioning away the pain actually went. Go figure. Actually go read Born to Run and you find out that one runs far more carefully barefoot than shod, not only that the stride is shorter with fore front strike and the muscles and the rolling of pronation acts as a spring - as a sort of bio-mechanical suspension.  Leonardo da Vinci said that the foot was a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art and if you look at his study of the bones of the foot you can see its inherent intricacies. It is a dynamic multi-flexible arching platform and  a very sophisticated piece of kit which we have squashed into shoes for centuries....and maybe the foot doesn't want to be locked into a shoe!!!

Puma Mobiums, inspiration, motivation and vibram five fingers

I thought I should, you know, talk about my running history and my inspiration to be a barefoot runner. Well, I can honestly say that I never ran a race as I am not at all competitive, and I usually end up with an overuse injury such as shin splints or knee pain or ankle pain etc etc, so my running never lasted for more than a year or two at a time, then it got forgotten then I would start again. Seventeen years (!) later and I find I haven't got anywhere. I've just older and my hair's fallen out and I have grown a beer belly.

The main inspiration for the barefoot thing is the guy in the photograph here, Uncle Joe.

As you can see Uncle Joe likes to use a mattock in a field with no shoes on, in fact, he hardly wears shoes at all. In his mid-eighties now and he is as strong as an ox, because no one has ever told him that he is old and should be in a home. If you get a cold he will look at you and say "it's because you wear shoes" or he would say that if he could speak because he is a deaf-mute, so he communicates with a sign language that he invented himself. He is an awesome chap, and I don't think I will ever meet a person as awesome as him. He is my hero.

The next person, well occasion that inspired me, I was on holiday and chasing my two year old son bare foot in a grass meadow, as I was doing it the paleo running thing sprang to mind, and of course the book Born to Run which I had read years before. Oddly I was on the estate of the paleoanthropologist Bernard Grant Campbell and these two things sort of fell into place the barefoot paleo caveman, that fundamental quality of being a human being. It has taken me another six months from this point to ease myself back into running and boy is it hard work when you are unfit.

So I don't have any running credentials, I learnt to trail run in the sugar cane fields of Reunion Island, have had gait analysis and owned many of the brand trainers including Adidas, Brooks and Asics, and have suffered from shin splints, runners knee, ankle pain and a strange but debilitating pain between tibia and the muscle. I have an almost professional interest in the foot being a "retired" chiropodist (more about that later) as well as having studied (neuro) art history, in particular Leonardo da Vinci who wrote that the foot was “ a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.”

So that's where I'm coming from. Oh, and my Vibram Five Fingers KSO arrived, they look like a piece of tyre tread fused onto a spandex glove - and I can't wait to try them out! Check out the photo: