Everything old is new again
I never owned a pair of Birkenstocks and never bought a pair of Crocs, I hated those shoes and still do. I never owned a Keen sandal, they always looked so dikey, excuse the expression. But yesterday, I bought a pair of Vibram Five Fingers running shoes.
This came after a friend was wearing a minimal pair of running shoes and said I should read Born to Run, and then other friends who run short races said that these shoes are all the rage. I have been wearing them to get my feet used to them and already I love them. Mind you, I never wore Crocs or Keens because of the way they look, and these look amphibian but they are so comfortable, it’s crazy. And since yoga has been teaching me to use all of my toes to grip and balance, having my pinky toe engaged in walking and running feels more natural than anything else I’ve ever done before. Highly recommend.
It’s interesting that Born to Run came out around the same time as Vibram began making these shoes – it was purely coincidental. An Italian designer designed the five finger shoes and Vibram, a sole manufacturer, tried to sell it to many different shoe companies and none bit on it, and so they decided to do it themselves and now these are the number one selling shoes. There was an article recently in Nature about bare foot running:
Humans have engaged in endurance running for millions of years, but the modern running shoe was not invented until the 1970s. For most of human evolutionary history, runners were either barefoot or wore minimal footwear such as sandals or moccasins with smaller heels and little cushioning relative to modern running shoes. We wondered how runners coped with the impact caused by the foot colliding with the ground before the invention of the modern shoe. Here we show that habitually barefoot endurance runners often land on the fore-foot (fore-foot strike) before bringing down the heel, but they sometimes land with a flat foot (mid-foot strike) or, less often, on the heel (rear-foot strike). In contrast, habitually shod runners mostly rear-foot strike, facilitated by the elevated and cushioned heel of the modern running shoe. Kinematic and kinetic analyses show that even on hard surfaces, barefoot runners who fore-foot strike generate smaller collision forces than shod rear-foot strikers. This difference results primarily from a more plantarflexed foot at landing and more ankle compliance during impact, decreasing the effective mass of the body that collides with the ground. Fore-foot- and mid-foot-strike gaits were probably more common when humans ran barefoot or in minimal shoes, and may protect the feet and lower limbs from some of the impact-related injuries now experienced by a high percentage of runners.
April 28th, 2011 at 11:51 am
My daughter read that too; now she wears her “gorilla” shoes as I call them (they’re black) almost everywhere she goes walking–except the office. She swears by them, even wore them in Las Vegas on a sun-seeking Easter weekend.
April 28th, 2011 at 5:53 pm
They’re all the rage Alice – you should try a pair and Hubby too! Gorilla is funny – since mine are pink and orange Tatjana calls me Froggy but in Croatia which is Jabica (yah bee tsa).