The differences between a conventional running shoe (Saucony Ride) and a minimalist shoe (Vivobarefoot Evo) are obvious when you put the shoes next to each other.
MARK TOMKINSON’S STORY is one you hear a lot these days.
A resident of Huntington Beach, California, Tomkinson started running in 2006. He ran half-marathons and marathons but battled injuries on and off. While training for a marathon in 2011, he had shin pain and tendinitis in his knee. Intrigued by stories of runners who’d become injury-free after switching from conventional running shoes to lower, lighter, flatter models, he ditched his old running shoes. He switched to doing all his running in a few popular minimalist shoes and barefoot. In 2012, he returned to the marathon he’d run in conventional shoes the year before and improved his time from 3:57 to 3:29. “I’ve gotten much faster, more efficient and 95 percent of the knee and shin problems have gone away,” Tomkinson says. “I am a huge advocate of minimalist running and preach it to anyone who will listen.”
Mimi Englander’s story is also one you hear a lot these days.
In 2010, the Littleton, Massachusetts, resident started running in Vibram FiveFingers. At first, things went well. She was able to run 7 miles at a time, 3 miles farther than she ever had in conventional running shoes. Longtime knee, back, and bunion issues improved. She stepped up her training even more and ran her first half-marathon in FiveFingers. Then the foot pain started. She kept running. About a year into her switch to FiveFingers, she stopped running because of pain in both Achilles tendons. She got an x-ray on her painful foot and learned that she had a metatarsal stress fracture. A year later, Englander was still getting back to running. “It’s slow going, as it should be,” she says. “My experience hasn’t dissuaded me; I know what I did wrong and am listening to my feet much more carefully, working to refine my form at the same time.”
Tomkinson and Englander are two of the millions of runners who’ve become intrigued by minimalist and barefoot running. In the past few years, no aspect of running has been discussed more than what type and how much shoe is best. Barefoot running has gone mainstream. Minimalism, or running in something other than conventional training shoes, has spread from a small segment of competitive runners to account for 11 percent of the US running shoe market in the first quarter of 2012.
In the early 2000s, running message boards began to fill with complaints about the state of running shoes. Longtime runners were frustrated by most of what was commercially available. The shoes, they said, were too heavy, too high off the ground, too heeled, too full of gadgetry purported to correct flaws in people’s running form. The shoes, they said, hurt rather than helped performance and increased rather than decreased injury rates. Runners shared experiences of switching to other types of shoes for all their mileage. Some opted for retro running shoes from the 1970s marketed as urban fashion wear. Some started doing even their slowest training runs in racing shoes. Others took a longtime practice of occasional barefoot running and did more and more of their running unshod.
The differences between a conventional running shoe (Saucony Ride) and a minimalist shoe (Vivobarefoot Evo) are obvious when you put the shoes next to each other.
The critique of modern running shoes went like this: By placing a large amount of soft foam and an elevated heel between the runner’s foot and the ground, modern running shoes change people’s running form for the worse. Modern shoes encourage a hard heel landing rather than a softer midfoot landing; the latter is how people run when barefoot, the critique continued. Hard heel landings are like braking with every step, which slows you down and sends the impact forces of landing up your body, leading to injury.
In addition, the critique continued, the large amounts of cushioning rob the body of its natural means of stability, because the feet can no longer get good sensory feedback as they roll through the gait cycle. Being so big, the shoes add weight that makes a quick, light cadence more difficult. The critique ended with the point that all the add-ons, like motion-control devices and midsoles of different densities, add more weight and rob the foot that much more of its ability to run naturally.
This isn’t as radical a critique as it might seem at first. The type of running shoe described above—heavily cushioned, sloping significantly from heel to toe—became widely available only at the end of the 1970s. Because pronation—how much your foot rolls in as you move from landing to toe-off—could be easily measured in labs, shoe companies made controlling pronation one of the guiding paradigms for designing shoes.
But the primary elements of conventional running shoe design were never proven to be meaningful before they were foisted on millions of runners. “Not every injury is related to pronation and overpronation,” says Brian Fullem, a sport podiatrist with 3 decades of running experience and a 14:25 5-K PR. “You need a certain amount of pronation to help absorb shock. And the heel height, I don’t know where that came from. The running shoe industry had a 12-millimeter heel-to-toe drop as standard, and there was never any basis for that.”
By the end of last decade, this rejection of conventional running shoes was no longer confined to a small group of longtime competitive runners. Nike had introduced the Free, which it marketed as a “training tool” to help strengthen the feet and lower legs. Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run became an unlikely bestseller and introduced minimalism to the masses. Research suggesting that modern running shoes contributed to poor form and increased risk of injury got mainstream press. Some runners, like Mark Tomkinson, found their running reborn and spoke of the switch to minimalism in evangelical terms. But many more runners, like Mimi Englander, discovered that simply switching shoes wasn’t a cure-all and could lead to problems of its own.
As more runners started running in less shoe, blogs and message boards filled with vigorous, often rancorous debate on the topic. As often happens with suddenly hot topics, people at the extremes were the loudest and most involved in the debate, regardless of their level of knowledge. People often universalized from their experience and shouted past each other. The terms of the discussion got oversimplified: Is barefoot running good? Should you throw away your old running shoes? Aren’t those people prancing around in those toe shoes going to wreck their feet?
Meanwhile, most runners read and heard about barefoot running and minimalism, and kept right on doing whatever they’d always done. After all, minimalist shoes accounting for 11 percent of running shoe sales means that conventional running shoes account for 89 percent of running shoe sales.
This book is for those runners, the vast majority of whom are curious about minimalism and barefoot running but still have some basic questions: Why is changing from conventional shoes worth considering? What is the most relevant information on the topic? How can I experiment with minimalism in a safe, sustainable way that will improve my running?
I’ve organized this book to answer these questions in a logical way. Before we get started on the specifics, I want to give you an idea where I’m coming from.
The basic premise of this book is that minimalism and barefoot running are means to an end. That end is running with better form and less injury, both of which should make you faster and help you enjoy your running more.
It’s important to keep this means-to-an-end framework in mind. Minimalism and barefoot running are tools, not magic bullets. As Jay Johnson, who has coached national champions, collegiate runners, and recreational runners, says, “I think most people want the easy fix. There’s no easy answer in running. Ever!”
That’s another way of saying that, in running, there are no secrets—either of modern elites or of supposedly lost tribes. There are, however, best practices worked out through experimentation by ambitious, experienced, open-minded runners. The distinction matters because secrets imply, “Do this one thing and everything will be fixed.” Best practices imply, “Here’s a process that you can implement to improve as a runner.”
“There are no secrets” also means keeping the importance of this or any aspect of running in perspective. There’s no one element of running that deserves obsessive focus while you underemphasize other contributors to successful running. What you have on your feet when you run matters a lot. So do a lot of other things: how much and how far you run, how strong and flexible you are, your diet, your running form, and how you spend your nonrunning time. Zealotry never works out over the long term in running.
Throughout this book, our conceptual framework will be a model that former Nike Oregon Project coach Steve Magness, a real student of the sport, uses to judge the merits of ideas. He calls it the three legs of the stool, with the legs being theory, research, and practical. “If you have all three legs of the stool aligned, then you can be pretty sure an idea is legit,” Magness says. “If you have two legs of the stool, you can sometimes make it work, depending on how strong those two legs are. If you have just one solid leg, then it’s obviously not going to stand.”
In running terms, the practical leg of the stool most often means looking at what the most successful runners have been doing over the longest period of time. Elite runners aren’t a different species from the rest of us. Yes, they have more genetic running aptitude than most people. But they do the same sport we all do; like everyone, they’re subject to gravity and apathy. Through unfathomable hours of practice and thought, their trial-and-error process reveals what works best most of the time for most runners. The same is true of runners who’ve been consistently able to meet their goals over long stretches of time. They have things to teach other runners.
That’s why the experts we’ll hear from in this book are for the most part not the ones usually cited when you read about minimalism. Our guides will be running experts with deep knowledge and experience throughout the sport, not just in minimalism. They’re best able to place minimalism in perspective and show how it fits in with other aspects of long-term healthy and happy running.
In most chapters, we’ll also meet runners who describe themselves as minimalists. My goal in presenting these “Meet a Minimalist” profiles is to highlight the range of discoveries—and mistakes—runners often make when they start experimenting with running in less shoe. In some cases, the experiment seems to have gone well; in other cases, not so well. Read the profiles to learn ordinary runners’ experiences with minimalism, while bearing in mind that there are many variables that affect success and failure in running. That is, read the profiles more to gather general ideas than to find models to mimic.
I’ve run more than 100,000 miles since I started running as a teenager in 1979. I’ve run almost all those miles in light, low-to-the-ground shoes. At first that was because such shoes were pretty much all that was available. But even after more cushioned shoes became the norm, I instinctively gravitated toward the light, low models. They just made running more enjoyable. When I ran in bulkier models—most often while testing them for magazine shoe reviews—I spent most of the run noticing the shoes—how they felt too heavy, how I felt suspended off the ground and tilted forward by the large heel.
I began barefoot running not long after I started the sport. In 10th grade my running geek friends and I read advice from coaches in Runner’s World, Running Times, and The Runner (now defunct). They recommended small amounts of barefoot running to strengthen the feet and improve form. And we knew our history—how Abebe Bikila won the 1960 Olympic Marathon barefoot and how world-class Europeans sometimes raced on the track barefoot. On most easy days, our coach had us do 10 100-meter strides on grass. My friends and I started doing these sessions barefoot. We loved how the grass felt under our feet, and we had that eager-teen belief that we were training smarter than our rivals.
As it turned out, my school district didn’t allow athletes to leave school grounds for practice. So instead of hitting the roads on days we weren’t working out on the track, we were confined to a 1-mile perimeter of the school. It was almost entirely grass. Around and around and around we’d go, 5, 8, 10 times. This was also where we warmed up and cooled down on track days. My friends and I enjoyed our barefoot striders so much that we started doing our cooldowns barefoot. That felt good. We started doing some regular runs on easy days barefoot. That felt good, too. One Saturday I drove to school and did a barefoot 14-miler on that perimeter loop. It remains one of the most enjoyably memorable solo runs of my life.
The point of all this is that I’ve been what would now be called a minimalist my entire running life. Long before I started thinking about writing a book on minimalism, I watched the movement’s evolution with great interest. In the early part of this century, I was the kook. Friends would see me doing regular runs in racing shoes and ask, “How can you run in those?” I’d point at the huge midsoles and heels of their shoes and ask, “How can you run in those?” When they’d say something like, “I like the cushioning,” I’d respond, “Why that amount? Why not twice as much, or three times as much?” They would just shrug and we’d get on with our run. Like I said, I was the kook.
By the end of the decade, I was the boring old fart. Acquaintances would tell stories of reading Born to Run, switching immediately from their conventional running shoes to a barely there model, or even starting to run in Vibram FiveFingers after years of inactivity, and finding themselves injured. “Shocking,” I’d say in my unhelpful way. Casual runners—even nonrunners like my in-laws—would ask, “What do you think about barefoot running?” and I’d either give an answer far more long and involved than they wanted, full of caveats and codicils, or just sigh and try to change the topic.
Of course, all that time, my opinion and practices were more or less unchanged: Running in as little shoe as you can while staying a healthy, happy runner is a good goal. This isn’t a new development in running, a secret, or a magic bullet. It’s simply a goal that may help you enjoy your running more. And really, what more do any of us want from our running than to enjoy it on our terms for the rest of our lives?
To work toward that goal, use the same slow-burn ambition that the late Grete Waitz, nine-time winner of the New York City Marathon, advised for success in any area of running. “Hurry slowly,” Waitz said. “Be dedicated and disciplined and work hard, but take your time. Move ahead, but be patient.”
The first step toward meeting any goal is understanding why it’s worthwhile. Let’s start by looking at the most basic question about minimalism: Why bother?