CHAPTER 4
THE BAREFOOT REVOLUTION
Olympic coaches and a barefoot guru agree: Going shoeless, for a minute or a marathon, strengthens feet and instantly confers Soft-Running form and injury reduction
“No shirt, no shoes, no entry,” reads a sign at in the window of the Secret Spot restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach, California, but the words “no shoes” are half-blacked out.
“They did that because I’m half their business,” jokes Ken Saxton, who lives with his wife in a condo next door. Known as “The Barefoot Runner,” the longhaired, long-bearded Saxton hasn’t worn shoes (except on airlines) since 1987—not while ordering a tofu burrito, not while working his computer programmer job at Long Beach State University, and certainly not while running. He’s averaged 10 shoeless marathons a year since 2002, including 14 in 2006 at age 51. His bare feet are fleet, too, as he qualified for Boston in 2004 and ’05.
And there’s one more amazing barefoot feat: Saxton says he’s never been injured in over two decades of unshod running, even during a crazy 16-day period in ’06 when he ran four marathons. “Okay, I was a little worn-out,” he says, “but not hurt.”
Saxton’s barefoot feats have made him the pied piper of a tiny, but mushrooming barefoot running movement. Helped by the interest in “barefoot running shoes” like the Nike Free and the Vibram FiveFingers (“better than regular shoes, but they still deaden your feet,” he says; see “Barefoot Shoes” sidebar, p.35) his Runningbarefoot.org website is up to 200 to 300 hits a day and his e-mail list to 1,500 members—5 times more than in 2002. Three barefooters ran the L.A. Marathon with him in 2003; 8 did in 2007. The Omaha Marathon even started a barefoot division.
Saxton’s shoeless odyssey officially began when, as he puts it, “I just got tired of wearing out shoes, and shoes wearing out my feet.” That occurred in 1987, when, after years of mostly running barefoot on the beach, he wore shoes at the Long Beach Marathon, his first-ever 26.2-miler, finishing in 5 hours, 5 minutes. “My feet were so beat up and blistered at the end that I had to walk the last two miles,” he said. “After that, I gave up racing for ten years—and tried running barefoot on the streets out of desperation.”
Ken Saxton at the 2004 OC Marathon.
He was hooked after one shoeless run on pavement. “Barefoot, I immediately felt great,” he says. “I ran softer, lighter, landing on my forefoot and picking up my feet very quickly. But I actually wasn’t thinking at all about my form. Taking on a more shock-absorbing form was automatic—like my body was getting instant biofeedback from the bottom of my feet, and simply knew what to do.”
In 1997, after months of training with local off-road legend Bill McDermott (see Chapter 6), Saxton started racing again. He was surprised to finish the hilly, 10-mile Chino Hills Road Less Traveled in 1 hour, 11 minutes—good for 8th place in his 40-45 age-group. Even more surprising was the crowd reaction.
“I felt almost like a celebrity,” he said. “Many of the runners ‘interviewed’ me after the event.” So many asked if it hurt his feet to run barefoot that he began to answer their question with a question: “Doesn’t it hurt to run with those on your feet?”
Saxton followed his first barefoot marathon, the 1998 Napa Valley Trail Marathon, with a barefoot 50k a month later. He set his PR of 3:18 at the Pacific Shoreline Marathon in Huntington Beach just before I visited him at his home in February 2004. Confident, self-effacing, and prone to funny quips, he floored me when he said he planned to (and ultimately did) run a marathon a month that year.
“Twelve marathons?” I said incredulously. “Don’t they say that you can’t run more than two or three marathons a year without hurting yourself?”
“That’s with shoes on,” he replied.
OLYMPIANS USE IT, TOO
Some might dismiss Saxton’s barefooted devotion as the quirky karma of a kooky vegetarian hippie, but it’s hard to ignore respected coaches who advocate the same thing.
A call to the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California, led me to venerable middle- and short-distance coach Brooks Johnson, who had enthusiastically made use of barefoot running since the sixties.
“To counteract the negative effect of shoes, you should spend as much time running barefoot as possible,” said Johnson, who gained fame for his work with Regina Jacobs, Patti Sue Plummer, and other future Olympians at Stanford University from 1979 to 1992. “Putting padding between your foot and the ground weakens foot muscles and dulls the proprioceptive sensors that tell them when to fire. Your toes, for instance, dig in when you lean forward while barefooted, but don’t with shoes on. And the rocking and rolling on top of that unstable padding causes all kinds of knee problems, like chondromalacia. Barefoot running gets the foot back to normal.”
RUNNING CORRECTLY—NATURALLY
Just by taking your shoes off, you will naturallly adopt the form of the guy at the right—which also happens to be the low-impact, highly efficient form used by elite runners. By running barefoot a few minutes a day, you, too, can teach yourself to run like this even when you put your shoes back on.
In other words, shoes do a nice job of protecting your feet from rocks, needles, and glass, but over time they desensitize the feet, make them lazy and weak, and trigger a chain reaction up the entire leg that can lead to shin splints, jogger’s knee, and IT-Band strains. Big cushiony heels can just add to the problem, shortening calf muscles and the Achilles tendon.
The fix: Go au naturel. Barefooting stretches out the calves and gets foot muscles properly functioning again, like strength training for feet. “You see a lot of athletes with great engines but flat tires,” said Johnson. “Barefoot running quickly pumps the tires back up.”
Johnson said he had Plummer, 5th in the 5000-meter at the 1992 Olympics, running barefoot so much that her foot expanded one shoe size. At the OTC in 2004, he and coach Joe Vehill, in charge of distance runners like Deena Drossin Kastor, had all their athletes warm up and warm down with barefoot running every day.
“Remember that barefoot running isn’t new,” said Vehill. “We’ve been running on sand for a long time. But it’s actually become more important as shoe technology has gotten better.”
He and the iconoclastic Johnson don’t agree on everything—Vehill encourages his runners to run “tall” (straight up), while Johnson, like the Pose Method’s Nicholas Romanov, favors a forward lean. But strong feet are a must for all, which is why the OTC coaches to this day use barefoot running and a number of other foot-strengtheners: toe raises, plyometrics, stairstep calf raises, toe-in, toe-out exercises with surgical tubing, and scrunching up towels and picking up marbles with their toes.
The theory is that Western kids, wearing shoes by age two, weaken their feet. Contrast that with Kenyans, who often cavort shoeless into junior high. An exception Johnson noted was Mary Decker, who almost exclusively ran barefoot before age 16, just like her South African rival Zola Budd, the barefoot sensation of the ’80s. As for proof that a barefooter can win in competition, that’s easy: Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila, sans shoes, won the 1960 Olympic marathon in Rome.
WHAT IT FEELS LIKE
At the OTC, the athletes run barefoot on grass. But Saxton runs on trails, asphalt, and concrete. When he offered to take me on a 3-miler on the Bolsa Chica beach bike path down the street from his condo, I eagerly nodded okay. But inwardly, I was spooked. I looked at the blacktop. I looked at my toenails. And I cringed....
BAREFOOT SHOES TOE THE LINE
Whether you can replicate “barefoot running” once you lace up your shoes isn’t easy. After a couple of weeks of barefoot drills, some runners will naturally make the switch to the balls of their feet during their regular runs, while some need months. For those who want to ease the transition into barefooting, Nike introduced its highly flexible, thin-soled Free in 2004. But those only went halfway. If you want to go nearly 100%, but are still leery of stepping on wayward rocks and twigs, there’s only one game in town: FiveFingers.
The Vibram FiveFingers is a “foot glove” with individual toes and a formfitting quarter-inch-thick sole. Made by the world’s most well-known maker of hiking shoe soles, they debuted in 2007 as a climbing shoe, but were quickly discovered by barefooters and barefoot wannabes. The perfect missing link between barefoot running and shoes, it can be used alone or in conjunction with Injinji five-toed socks. FiveFingers is the best of both worlds for those who want to make use of Soft Running but want to avoid the learning curve that comes with doing it in shoes.
But from the second we started, I was feeling no pain. In fact, I felt like I was running more smoothly and more stably than I ever had in my life. My forefoot landed lightly and mapped the contours of the blacktop like a blind man reading Braille. My air-cooled toes automatically spread wide and dug in, gripping the asphalt like Firestone 500s. Naturally and effortlessly, my body ran “soft”—slightly crouched, knees bent like springs to absorb shock, forefoot landing, rapid turnover, no possibility of a heel strike. Any momentary landing on a pebble was minimized by the light touch and the instant-reaction foot pickup.
As we finished, I was speechless. My feet didn’t hurt a bit. And neither did my left knee, recovering slowly from a 6-month-old torn-meniscus surgery and normally a bit painful after a run. Undoubtedly, running barefoot seems softer on your joints than running in shoes.
The best part of it? I didn’t have to do a thing. No tinkering with this and that, no self-monitoring. It was like regular Soft Running, but without all the thinking. Just take off your shoes and run!
Even if you’re a lifelong heel-striker, running barefoot instinctively lands you on your forefeet and gives you the shorter, more rapid strides of an elite runner. And if you insist on heel striking, I guarantee that you will only do it once (unless you enjoy pain).
Videos that Ken and I shot of each other showed classic, shock-absorbing soft-running form. But there was none of the forward lean of the Pose Method, which cites barefoot running as an inspiration. Both of us ran squat-legged with vertical backs.
The only irritation came an hour later, as my soles were a bit raw after our run. Ken warned me that I had pushed the envelope for a first-timer. (It’d be smart to start with a few minutes of barefooting, and build up over a month, like the Pose Method.) But my feet normalized after two days as if nothing had happened, and looked no different.
That raises the question: What do Saxton’s feet look like after years of running barefoot? The answer: Pretty normal. As we sat on his living room carpet, I grabbed his right foot and ran my fingers across the sole to check. No massive calluses, no noticeable scarring and cracking. The only sign there was something afoot was an enhanced muscularity, abnormally widespread toes, and a distinct lack of foot odor.
“That’s shoe odor,” he corrected.