Relentless Forward Progress_ A Guide to Running Ultramarathons - Bryon Powell [86]
There are some great advantages to learning barefoot running technique, though I’m not advising you go out, buy a pair of minimalist running shoes, and use them for your next ultra. Transitioning takes great time, and there’s something to be said for the protection on the bottom of your feet. If you read Born to Run and remember the Tarahumara Indians (really called the Raramuri) winning the race, they were in huarache sandals made of retreaded tires . . . not exactly minimalist, to say the least! Your feet take time to adapt, and during that time must be protected from rocks and other obstacles underfoot. If not, you’ll tear up your feet literally on the outside and on the inside.
With my book tour, I still run an average of 100-plus miles a week (sometimes much more), and though I’m more than four years into this game, my feet are still adapting. I’m fully barefoot for my short distances (10 to 20 miles on smooth terrain, 5 to 10 on really rocky terrain), and then start to add more and more shoe as the distances increase. I’ll always want a shoe without a high heel (I don’t want the bad form the heel promotes, nor the strain it puts on the body), and I’ll always want a shoe with flexibility so I can feel the ground and move the foot naturally. But what I’ll want as the distances increase is protection. Until my feet are harder than nails (and even the Tarahumara may wear shoes), I want something fairly substantial on the bottom of my feet if I’m going the distance.
Barefoot Benefits
So now that I’ve gone over the dos and don’ts, what are the benefits of going barefoot, or training barefoot as the case may be?
Indigenous people have been running barefoot or in sandals for thousands of years and are some of the best endurance athletes out there. First off, there are the modern-day Kenyans and Ethiopians, who all ran barefoot as children and regularly kick butt in everything from 1,500-meter track races through the marathon. They run with an amazing forefoot stride, gliding along as if they’re in second gear and everyone else is still in first (which technically, by running that way, is the case). Then there are the legendary Tarahumara and other Native American tribes whose messengers have run 100-to-200-mile runs or longer in a single go, either fully barefoot or with just a sandal on their foot. Then there are the Incan and Aztec messengers, famous, too, for their 100-plus-mile jaunts. There are African messengers, Aborigine runners, Maori, Turkish messengers, Tibetan Lung-Gom-Pa runners, and even modern-day marathon monks of Mount Hiei in Japan, all of whom run with almost nothing on their feet and are said to glide effortlessly for hundreds of miles at a time.
How do they do it? And how can we benefit from their experience?
They do it, as previously mentioned, by running with more of a forefoot strike, in essence running in second gear. When you’re barefoot, you quickly find that a heel strike hurts. Without a shoe to promote bad form, you quickly get off your heel and up onto your forefoot.
By learning to run barefoot, we not only reduce the impact on our bodies, instead turning our legs into natural springs, but gain far greater efficiency as well. When we’re landing on our heels, and to a lesser extent our midfoot, we have to hit the brakes with every stride. This puts us in a constant game of braking and reaccelerating. It takes its toll on the body with constant eccentric muscle contractions (muscles having to lengthen at the same time they’re trying to shorten; picture the sensation of running a long downhill and what it does to your quads, then remember that that’s what you’re doing with every stride in a traditional shoe), which gradually weaken our muscles and leave them a quivering wreck. It’s also forcing us to work extra hard, wasting valuable energy we can ill afford to spend over the distance. In essence,