I’ve no idea how Usain Bolt started his brilliant running career as a kid in Jamaica but I’d be pretty confident the world’s fastest man did a lot of his early charging around in bare feet. It doesn’t seem to have done him any harm. In fact, when it comes to running, it may be that bare is best.
At least that’s what Craig Richards thinks, and he’s spent a lot of time studying the pros and cons of sports footwear. And here’s a warning – anyone who’s just forked out a few hundred bucks for a new pair of running shoes, stop reading now.
One the University of Newcastle researcher’s main findings was that there’s no evidence running shoes do you any good. In fact, they may lead to injuries. Bizarrely, one Swiss study found that runners with more expensive shoes actually got more injuries than those in cheaper pairs.
The crux of Richards’ argument is that the elevated and cushioned heel of the modern running shoe changes the gait of the runner in a way that creates new stresses. It might even slow you down.
Richard’s isn’t the only one making the claim. A new book by Christopher McDougall, Born to Run, also argues that Nike’s invention of the modern running shoe in the early 1970s has done more harm than good.
In Richard’s case, his interest began as a combination of his studies in medicine, and love of competitive running. “I was always getting injured,” he says. “It was inexplicable. I wasn’t doing high mileage, I was fairly careful, I am bio-mechanically normal, I had top of the line shoes. I was doing all the right stuff but I was getting injured all the time.”
So the young bloke theorised his injuries could be coming from striking his heel first. He flicked the shoes and started running in bare feet. And his gait changed dramatically.
“Nobody lands on their heels in bare feet,” he explains. “In fact nobody lands on their heel unless there’s cushioning in the shoes or there’s elevation in the heel. Our current generation thinks it’s normal to land on your heel when you run but bio-mechanically speaking striking heel first defines you as walking not running.
“There’s a whole system of springs in your foot and through your Achilles tendon and calf which are designed for running. By landing on your heel you’ve replaced the body’s natural suspension system with an artificial system in the shoe.”
That stops you landing in the middle of your foot. Which is best? So far, he says, there hasn’t been a proper study comparing people running bare foot and someone landing on their heel. “But anecdotally for me…the modern running shoe for some people tipped them into a zone where they’re injured all the time.”
Yet if there’s no evidence that running shoes will make you run faster, or with less injury, the alternative sounds impractical. Some great African distance runners may have grown up running vast distances in bare feet, but most of us would wince at the smallest stone.
Richards says he’s started a private consultancy, working with an unnamed shoe company, to develop an alternative shoe that doesn’t affect the gait but protects from sharp surfaces. Hard surfaces are fine.
Already there are alternatives, such as the Italian company Vibram’s FiveFingers, a shoe that looks more like a combination of glove and sock.
“The typical human foot is really a miracle of evolution with 26 bones, 33 joints, and more than 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments,” says Vibram’s website. “Like the rest of the body, to keep our feet healthy, they need to be stimulated and exercised. Many experts believe the shoes we wear not only cast the foot in a protective form, but also weaken our foot and leg muscles, leaving them underdeveloped and more prone to injury.”
“I went to the local cross country club at the weekend and there were three other runners wearing Vibram FiveFingers,” Richards says. “So it’s approaching the mainstream.”
In his case, it’s been ten years since he ran in the typical running shoe, and says he hasn’t had injuries since.
“Typical runners get a lot of minor recurrent or chronic overstress injuries of the shin the knee the ankle the foot and maybe the hamstrings,” he says. “It’s mainly the knee and the foot. All the figures are rubbery because nobody has done proper research. But the sense is that injury rates haven’t changed in the last 30 years but the pattern has. We’ve protected the foot at the expense of the knee.
For the big shoe companies, Richards thinks there is opportunity to differentiate their products. “The only problem is what it does for their credibility. They’ve been very careful. No major shoe company has ever said these shoes will decrease your risk of injury. It’s all based on perception…”
And the other issue is performance. Football players, he says, are prevented from running properly by their boots. “Most of these guys sprinting, they run terribly - they run on their heels, not like a sprinter runs.”
His new research will comparing classic heel-strike running shoes with a new design for runners landing on the ball of their feet. “We’re looking at performance…. whether you run faster,” Richards says. “We’ll monitor injury rates but to get a clear picture need a bigger study.”
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