Chapter 25
BAREFOOT TED was right, of course.
Lost in all the fireworks between Ted and Caballo was an important point: running shoes may be the most destructive force to ever hit the human foot. Barefoot Ted, in his own weird way, was becoming the Neil Armstrong of twenty-first-century distance running, an ace test pilot whose small steps could have tremendous benefit for the rest of mankind. If that seems like excessive stature to load on Barefoot Ted’s shoulders, consider these words by Dr. Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University:
“A lot of foot and knee injuries that are currently plaguing us are actually caused by people running with shoes that actually make our feet weak, cause us to overpronate, give us knee problems. Until 1972, when the modern athletic shoe was invented by Nike, people ran in very thin-soled shoes, had strong feet, and had much lower incidence of knee injuries.”
And the cost of those injuries? Fatal disease in epidemic proportions. “Humans really are obligatorily required to do aerobic exercise in order to stay healthy, and I think that has deep roots in our evolutionary history,” Dr. Lieberman said. “If there’s any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it’s to run.”
Magic bullet? The last time a scientist with Dr. Lieberman’s credentials used that term, he’d just created penicillin. Dr. Lieberman knew it, and meant it. If running shoes never existed, he was saying, more people would be running. If more people ran, fewer would be dying of degenerative heart disease, sudden cardiac arrest, hypertension, blocked arteries, diabetes, and most other deadly ailments of the Western world.
That’s a staggering amount of guilt to lay at Nike’s feet. But the most remarkable part? Nike already knew it.
In April 2001, two Nike reps were watching the Stanford University track team practice. Part of a Nike rep’s job is getting feedback from its sponsored runners about which shoes they prefer, but that was proving difficult at the moment because the Stanford runners all seemed to prefer … nothing.
“Vin, what’s up with the barefooting?” they called to Stanford head coach Vin Lananna. “Didn’t we send you enough shoes?”
Coach Lananna walked over to explain. “I can’t prove this,” he explained, “but I believe when my runners train barefoot, they run faster and suffer fewer injuries.”
Faster and fewer injuries? Coming from anyone else, the Nike guys would have politely uh-huhed and ignored it, but this was one coach whose ideas they took seriously. Like Joe Vigil, Lananna was rarely mentioned without the word “visionary” or “innovator” popping up. In just ten years at Stanford, Lananna’s track and cross-country teams had won five NCAA team championships and twenty-two individual titles, and Lananna himself had been named NCAA Cross Country Coach of the Year. Lananna had already sent three runners to the Olympics and was busy grooming more with his Nike-sponsored “Farm Team,” a post-college club for the best of the very best. Needless to say, the Nike reps were a little chagrined to hear that Lananna felt the best shoes Nike had to offer were worse than no shoes at all.
“We’ve shielded our feet from their natural position by providing more and more support,” Lananna insisted. That’s why he made sure his runners always did part of their workouts in bare feet on the track’s infield. “I know as a shoe company, it’s not the greatest thing to have a sponsored team not use your product, but people went thousands of years without shoes. I think you try to do all these corrective things with shoes and you overcompensate. You fix things that don’t need fixing. If you strengthen the foot by going barefoot, I think you reduce the risk of Achilles and knee and plantar fascia problems.”
“Risk” isn’t quite the right term; it’s more like “dead certainty.” Every year, anywhere from 65 to 80 percent of all runners suffer an injury. That’s nearly every runner, every single year. No matter who you are, no matter how much you run, your odds of getting hurt are the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, fast or slow, pudgy or ripped as a racehorse, your feet are still in the danger zone.
Maybe you’ll beat the odds if you stretch like a swami? Nope. In a 1993 study of Dutch athletes published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, one group of runners was taught how to warm up and stretch while a second group received no “injury prevention” coaching. Their injury rates? Identical. Stretching came out even worse in a follow-up study performed the following year at the University of Hawaii; it found that runners who stretched were 33 percent more likely to get hurt.
Lucky for us, though, we live in a golden age of technology. Running-shoe companies have had a quarter century to perfect their designs, so logically, the injury rate must be in free fall by now. After all, Adidas has come up with a $250 shoe with a microprocessor in the sole that instantly adjusts cushioning for every stride. Asics spent three million dollars and eight years—three more than it took the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bomb—to invent the awe-inspiring Kinsei, a shoe that boasts “multi-angled forefoot gel pods,” a “midfoot thrust enhancer,” and an “infinitely adaptable heel component that isolates and absorbs impact to reduce pronation and aid in forward propulsion.” That’s big bucks for sneaks you’ll have to toss in the garbage in ninety days, but at least you’ll never limp again.
Right?
Sorry.
“Since the first real studies were done in the late ’70’s, Achilles complaints have actually increased by about 10 percent, while plantar fasciitis has remained the same,” says Dr. Stephen Pribut, a running-injury specialist and past president of the American Academy of Podiatric Sports Medicine. “The technological advancements over the past thirty years have been amazing,” adds Dr. Irene Davis, the director of the Running Injury Clinic at the University of Delaware. “We’ve seen tremendous innovations in motion control and cushioning. And yet the remedies don’t seem to defeat the ailments.”
In fact, there’s no evidence that running shoes are any help at all in injury prevention. In a 2008 research paper for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Dr. Craig Richards, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed that there are no evidence-based studies—not one—that demonstrate that running shoes make you less prone to injury.
It was an astonishing revelation that had been hidden in plain sight for thirty-five years. Dr. Richards was so stunned that a twenty-billion-dollar industry seemed to be based on nothing but empty promises and wishful thinking that he even issued a challenge:
Is any running shoe company prepared to claim that wearing their distance running shoes will decrease your risk of suffering musculoskeletal running injuries?
Is any shoe manufacturer prepared to claim that wearing their running shoes will improve your distance running performance?
If you are prepared to make these claims, where is your peer reviewed data to back it up?
Dr. Richards waited, and even tried contacting the major shoe companies for their data. In response, he got silence.
So if running shoes don’t make you go faster and don’t stop you from getting hurt, then what, exactly, are you paying for? What are the benefits of all those microchips, “thrust enhancers,” air cushions, torsion devices, and roll bars? Well, if you have a pair of Kinseis in your closet, brace yourself for some bad news. And like all bad news, it comes in threes:
PAINFUL TRUTH No. 1: The Best Shoes Are the Worst
RUNNERS wearing top-of-the-line shoes are 123 percent more likely to get injured than runners in cheap shoes, according to a study led by Bernard Marti, M.D., a preventative-medicine specialist at Switzerland’s University of Bern. Dr. Marti’s research team analyzed 4,358 runners in the Bern Grand-Prix, a 9.6- mile road race. All the runners filled out an extensive questionnaire that detailed their training habits and footwear for the previous year; as it turned out, 45 percent had been hurt during that time.
But what surprised Dr. Marti, as he pointed out in The American Journal of Sports Medicine in 1989, was the fact that the most common variable among the casualties wasn’t training surface, running speed, weekly mileage, or “competitive training motivation.” It wasn’t even body weight, or a history of previous injury: it was the price of the shoe. Runners in shoes that cost more than $95 were more than twice as likely to get hurt as runners in shoes that cost less than $40. Follow-up studies found similar results, like the 1991 report in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise that found that “Wearers of expensive running shoes that are promoted as having additional features that protect (e.g., more cushioning, ‘pronation correction’) are injured significantly more frequently than runners wearing inexpensive shoes (costing less than $40).”
What a cruel joke: for double the price, you get double the pain.
Sharp-eyed as ever, Coach Vin Lananna had already spotted the same phenomenon himself back in the early ’80s. “I once ordered high-end shoes for the team, and within two weeks, we had more plantar fasciitis and Achilles problems than I’d ever seen. So I sent them back and told them, ‘Send me my cheap shoes,’” Lananna says. “Ever since then, I’ve always ordered the low-end shoes. It’s not because I’m cheap. It’s because I’m in the business of making athletes run fast and stay healthy.”
PAINFUL TRUTH No. 2: Feet Like a Good Beating
AS FAR back as 1988, Dr. Barry Bates, the head of the University of Oregon’s Biomechanics/Sports Medicine Laboratory, gathered data that suggested that beat-up running shoes are safer than newer ones. In the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy, Dr. Bates and his colleagues reported that as shoes wore down and their cushioning thinned, runners gained more foot control.
So how do foot control and a flapping old sole add up to injury-free legs? Because of one magic ingredient: fear. Contrary to what pillowy-sounding names like the Adidas MegaBounce would have you believe, all that cushioning does nothing to reduce impact. Logically that should be obvious—the impact on your legs from running can be up to twelve times your body weight, so it’s preposterous to believe a half inch of rubber is going to make a bit of difference against, in my case, 2,760 pounds of earthbound beef. You can cover an egg with an oven mitt before rapping it with a hammer, but that egg ain’t coming out alive.
When E. C. Frederick, then the director of Nike Sports Research Lab, arrived at the 1986 meeting of the American Society of Biomechanics, he was packing a bombshell. “When subjects were tested with soft versus hard shoes,” he said, “no difference in impact force was found.” No difference! “And curiously,” he added, “the second, propulsive peak in the vertical ground reaction force was actually higher with soft shoes.”
The puzzling conclusion: the more cushioned the shoe, the less protection it provides.
Researchers at the University of Oregon’s Biomechanics/Sports Medicine Laboratory were verifying the same finding. As running shoes got worn down and their cushioning hardened, the Oregon researchers revealed in a 1988 study for the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy, runners’ feet stabilized and became less wobbly. It would take about ten years before scientists came up with an explanation for why the old shoes that sports companies were telling you to throw away were better than the new ones they were urging you to buy. At McGill University in Montreal, Steven Robbins, M.D., and Edward Waked, Ph.D., performed a series of tests on gymnasts. They found that the thicker the landing mat, the harder the gymnasts stuck their landings. Instinctively, the gymnasts were searching for stability. When they sensed a soft surface underfoot, they slapped down hard to ensure balance.
Runners do the same thing, Robbins and Waked found: just the way your arms automatically fly up when you slip on ice, your legs and feet instinctively come down hard when they sense something squishy underfoot. When you run in cushioned shoes, your feet are pushing through the soles in search of a hard, stable platform.
“We conclude that balance and vertical impact are closely related,” the McGill docs wrote. “According to our findings, currently available sports shoes … are too soft and thick, and should be redesigned if they are to protect humans performing sports.”
Until reading this study, I’d been mystified by an experience I’d had at the Running Injury Clinic. I’d run back and forth over a force plate while alternating between bare feet, a superthin shoe, and the well-cushioned Nike Pegasus. Whenever I changed shoes, the impact levels changed as well—but not the way I’d expected. My impact forces were lightest in bare feet, and heaviest in the Pegs. My running form also varied: when I changed footwear, I instinctively changed my footfall. “You’re much more of a heel striker in the Pegasus,” Dr. Irene Davis concluded.
David Smyntek decided to test the impact theory with a unique experiment of his own. As both a runner and a physical therapist specializing in acute rehabilitation, Smyntek was wary when the people telling him he had to buy new shoes were the same people who sold them. He’d been warned forever by Runner’s World and his local running store that he had to replace his shoes every three hundred to five hundred miles, but how was it that Arthur Newton, one of the greatest ultrarunners of all time, saw no reason to replace his thin rubber sneakers until he’d put at least four thousand miles on them? Newton not only won the 55- mile Comrades race five times in the 1930s, but his legs were still springy enough to break the record for the 100-mile Bath-to-London run at age fifty-one.
So Smyntek decided to see if he could out-Newton Newton. “When my shoes wear down on one side,” he wondered, “what if I just wear them on the wrong feet?” Thus began the Crazy Foot Experiment: when his shoes got thin on the outside edge, Dave swapped the right for the left and kept running. “You have to understand the man,” says Ken Learman, one of Dave’s fellow therapists. “Dave is not the average individual. He’s curious, smart, the kind of guy you can’t BS real easy. He’ll say, ‘Hey, if it’s supposed to be this way, let’s see if it really is.’”
For the next ten years, David ran five miles a day, every day. Once he realized he could run comfortably in wrong-footed shoes, he started questioning why he needed running shoes in the first place. If he wasn’t using them the way they were designed, Dave reasoned, maybe that design wasn’t such a big deal after all. From then on, he only bought cheap dime-store sneaks.
“Here he is, running more than most people, with the wrong shoe on the wrong foot and not having any problems,” Ken Learman says. “That experiment taught us all something. Taught us that when it comes to running shoes, all that glitters isn’t gold.”
FINAL PAINFUL TRUTH: Even Alan Webb Says “Human Beings
Are Designed to Run Without Shoes”
BEFORE Alan Webb became America’s greatest miler, he was a flat-footed frosh with awful form. But his high school coach saw potential, and began rebuilding Alan from—no exaggeration—the ground up.
“I had injury problems early on, and it became apparent that my biomechanics could cause injury,” Webb told me. “So we did foot-strengthening drills and special walks in bare feet.” Bit by bit, Webb watched his feet transform before his eyes. “I was a size twelve and flat-footed, and now I’m a nine or ten. As the muscles in my feet got stronger, my arch got higher.” Because of the barefoot drills, Webb also cut down on his injuries, allowing him to handle the kind of heavy training that would lead to his U.S. record for the mile and the fastest 1,500- meter time in the world for the year 2007.
“Barefoot running has been one of my training philosophies for years,” said Gerard Hartmann, Ph.D., the Irish physical therapist who serves as the Great and Powerful Oz for the world’s finest distance runners. Paula Radcliffe never runs a marathon without seeing Dr. Hartmann first, and titans like Haile Gebrselassie and Khalid Khannouchi have trusted their feet to his hands. For decades, Dr. Hartmann has been watching the explosion of orthotics and ever-more-structured running shoes with dismay.
“The deconditioned musculature of the foot is the greatest issue leading to injury, and we’ve allowed our feet to become badly deconditioned over the past twenty-five years,” Dr. Hartmann said. “Pronation has become this very bad word, but it’s just the natural movement of the foot. The foot is supposed to pronate.”
To see pronation in action, kick off your shoes and run down the driveway. On a hard surface, your feet will briefly unlearn the habits they picked up in shoes and automatically shift to self-defense mode: you’ll find yourself landing on the outside edge of your foot, then gently rolling from little toe over to big until your foot is flat. That’s pronation—just a mild, shock-absorbing twist that allows your arch to compress.
But back in the ’70s, the most respected voice in running began expressing some doubts about all that foot twisting. Dr. George Sheehan was a cardiologist whose essays on the beauty of running had made him the philosopher-king of the marathon set, and he came up with the notion that excessive pronation might be the cause of runner’s knee. He was both right and very, very wrong. You have to land on your heel to overpronate, and you can only land on your heel if it’s cushioned. Nevertheless, the shoe companies were quick to respond to Dr. Sheehan’s call to arms and came up with a nuclear response; they created monstrously wedged and superengineered shoes that wiped out virtually all pronation.
“But once you block a natural movement,” Dr. Hartmann said, “you adversely affect the others. We’ve done studies, and only two to three percent of the population has real biomechanical problems. So who is getting all these orthotics? Every time we put someone in a corrective device, we’re creating new problems by treating ones that don’t exist.” In a startling admission in 2008, Runner’s World confessed that for years it had accidentally misled its readers by recommending corrective shoes for runners with plantar fasciitis: “But recent research has shown stability shoes are unlikely to relieve plantar fasciitis and may even exacerbate the symptoms” (italics mine).
“Just look at the architecture,” Dr. Hartmann explained. Blueprint your feet, and you’ll find a marvel that engineers have been trying to match for centuries. Your foot’s centerpiece is the arch, the greatest weight-bearing design ever created. The beauty of any arch is the way it gets stronger under stress; the harder you push down, the tighter its parts mesh. No stonemason worth his trowel would ever stick a support under an arch; push up from underneath, and you weaken the whole structure. Buttressing the foot’s arch from all sides is a high-tensile web of twenty-six bones, thirty-three joints, twelve rubbery tendons, and eighteen muscles, all stretching and flexing like an earthquake-resistant suspension bridge.
“Putting your feet in shoes is similar to putting them in a plaster cast,” Dr. Hartmann said. “If I put your leg in plaster, we’ll find forty to sixty percent atrophy of the musculature within six weeks. Something similar happens to your feet when they’re encased in shoes.” When shoes are doing the work, tendons stiffen and muscles shrivel. Feet live for a fight and thrive under pressure; let them laze around, as Alan Webb discovered, and they’ll collapse. Work them out, and they’ll arc up like a rainbow.
“I’ve worked with over a hundred of the best Kenyan runners, and one thing they have in common is marvelous elasticity in their feet,” Dr. Hartmann continued. “That comes from never running in shoes until you’re seventeen.” To this day, Dr. Hartmann believes that the best injury-prevention advice he’s ever heard came from a coach who advocated “running barefoot on dewy grass three times a week.”
He’s not the only medical professional preaching the Barefoot Doctrine. According to Dr. Paul W Brand, chief of rehab at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Carville, Louisiana, and a professor of surgery at Louisiana State University Medical School, we could wipe out every common foot ailment within a generation by kicking off our shoes. As far back as 1976, Dr. Brand was pointing out that nearly every case in his waiting room—corns, bunions, hammertoes, flat feet, fallen arches—was nearly nonexistent in countries where most people go barefoot.
“The barefoot walker receives a continuous stream of information about the ground and about his own relationship to it,” Dr. Brand has said, “while a shod foot sleeps inside an unchanging environment.”
Drumbeats for the barefoot uprising were growing. But instead of doctors leading the charge for a muscular foot, it was turning into a class war pitting podiatrists against their own patients. Barefoot advocates like Drs. Brand and Hartmann were still rare, while traditional podiatric thinking still saw human feet as Nature’s Mistake, a work in progress that could always be improved by a little scalpel-sculpting and orthotic reshaping.
That born-broken mentality found its perfect expression in The Runners’ Repair Manual. Written by Dr. Murray Weisenfeld, a leading sports podiatrist, it’s one of the top-selling foot-care books of all time, and begins with this dire pronouncement:
“Man’s foot was not originally designed for walking, much less running long distances.”
So what, according to the Manual, was our foot designed for? Well, at first swimming (“The modern foot evolved out of the fin of some primordial fish and these fins pointed backward”). After that, climbing (“The grasping foot permitted the creature to squat on branches without falling out”).
And then …?
And then, according to the podiatric account of evolution, we got stuck. While the rest of our bodies adapted beautifully to solid earth, somehow the only part of our body that actually touched the earth got left behind. We developed brains and hands deft enough to perform intravascular surgery, yet our feet never made it past the Paleolithic era. “Man’s foot is not yet completely adapted to the ground,” the Manual laments. “Only a portion of the population has been endowed with well ground-adapted feet.”
So who are these lucky few with well-evolved feet? Come to think of it, nobody: “Nature has not yet published her plan for the perfect modern runner’s foot,” Dr. Weisenfeld writes. “Until the perfect foot comes along, my experience has shown me that we’ve all got an excellent chance at having some kind of injury.” Nature may not have published her blueprint, but that didn’t stop some podiatrists from trying to come up with one of their own. And it was exactly that kind of overconfidence—the belief that four years of podiatric training could trump two million years of natural selection—that led to a catastrophic rash of operations in the ’70s.
“Not too many years ago, runner’s knee was treated by surgery,” Dr. Weisenfeld acknowledges. “That didn’t work too well, since you need that cushioning when you run.” Once the patients came out from under the knife, they discovered that their nagging ache had turned into a life-changing mutilation; without cartilage in their knees, they’d never be able to run without pain again. Despite the podiatric profession’s checkered history of attempting to one-up nature, The Runners’ Repair Manual never recommends strengthening feet; instead, the treatment of choice is always tape, orthotics, or surgery.
It even took Dr. Irene Davis, whose credentials and open-mindedness are hard to beat, until 2007 to take barefooting seriously, and only then because one of her patients flat-out defied her. He was so frustrated by his chronic plantar fasciitis, he wanted to try blasting it away by running in thin-soled, slipperlike shoes. Dr. Davis told him he was nuts. He did it anyway.
“To her surprise,” as BioMechanics magazine would later report, “the plantar fasciitis symptoms abated and the patient was able to run short distances in the shoes.”
“This is how we often learn things, when patients don’t listen to us,” Dr. Davis graciously responded. “I think perhaps the widespread plantar fasciitis in this country is partly due to the fact that we really don’t allow the muscles in our feet to do what they are designed to do.” She was so impressed by her rebellious patient’s recovery that she even began adding barefoot walks to her own workouts.
Nike doesn’t earn $17 billion a year by letting the Barefoot Teds of the world set the trends. Soon after the two Nike reps returned from Stanford with news that the barefoot uprising had even spread to elite college track, Nike set to work to see if it could make a buck from the problem it had created.
Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy—but that’s okay, because it’s largely their fault. The company was founded by Phil Knight, a University of Oregon runner who could sell anything, and Bill Bowerman, the University of Oregon coach who thought he knew everything. Before these two men got together, the modern running shoe didn’t exist. Neither did most modern running injuries.
For a guy who told so many people how to run, Bowerman didn’t do much of it himself. He only started to jog a little at age fifty, after spending time in New Zealand with Arthur Lydiard, the father of fitness running and the most influential distance-running coach of all time. Lydiard had begun the Auckland Joggers Club back in the late ’50s to help rehab heart-attack victims. It was wildly controversial at the time; physicians were certain that Lydiard was mobilizing a mass suicide. But once the formerly ill men realized how great they felt after a few weeks of running, they began inviting their wives, kids, and parents to come along for the two-hour trail rambles.
By the time Bill Bowerman paid his first visit in 1962, Lydiard’s Sunday morning group run was the biggest party in Auckland. Bowerman tried to join them, but was in such lousy shape that he had to be helped along by a seventy-three-year-old man who’d survived three coronaries. “God, the only thing that kept me alive was the hope that I would die,” Bowerman said afterward.
But he came home a convert, and soon penned a best-selling book whose one-word title introduced a new word and obsession to the American public: Jogging. Between writing and coaching, Bowerman was busy ruining his nervous system and his wife’s waffle iron by tinkering in the basement with molten rubber to invent a new kind of footwear. His experiments left Bowerman with a debilitating nerve condition, but also the most cushioned running shoe ever created. In a stroke of dark irony, Bowerman named it the Cortez—after the conquistador who plundered the New World for gold and unleashed a horrific smallpox epidemic.
Bowerman’s deftest move was advocating a new style of running that was only possible in his new style of shoe. The Cortez allowed people to run in a way no human safely could before: by landing on their bony heels. Before the invention of a cushioned shoe, runners through the ages had identical form: Jesse Owens, Roger Bannister, Frank Shorter, and even Emil Zatopek all ran with backs straight, knees bent, feet scratching back under their hips. They had no choice: the only shock absorption came from the compression of their legs and their thick pad of midfoot fat. Fred Wilt verified as much in 1959 in his classic track text, How They Train, which detailed the techniques of more than eighty of the world’s top runners. “The forward foot moves toward the track in a downward, backward, ‘stroking’ motion (not punching or pounding) and the outer edge of the ball of the foot makes first contact with the track,” Wilt writes. “Running progression results from these forces pushing behind the center of gravity of the body. …”
In fact, when the biomedical designer Van Phillips created a state-of-the-art prosthetic for amputee runners in 1984, he didn’t even bother equipping it with a heel. As a runner who lost his left leg below the knee in a water-skiing accident, Phillips understood that the heel was needed only for standing, not motion. Phillips’s C-shaped “Cheetah foot” mimics the performance of an organic leg so effectively, it allowed the South African double amputee Oscar Pistorius to compete with the world’s greatest sprinters.
But Bowerman had an idea: maybe you could grab a little extra distance if you stepped ahead of your center of gravity. Stick a chunk of rubber under the heel, he mused, and you could straighten your leg, land on your heel, and lengthen your stride. In Jogging, he compared the styles: with the time-tested “flat foot” strike, he acknowledged, “the wide surface area pillows the footstrike and is easy on the rest of the body.” Nevertheless, he still believed a “heel-to-toe” stride would be “the least tiring over long distances.” If you’ve got the shoe for it.
Bowerman’s marketing was brilliant. “The same man created a market for a product and then created the product itself,” as one Oregon financial columnist observed. “It’s genius, the kind of stuff they study in business schools.” Bowerman’s partner, the runner-turned-entrepreneur Phil Knight, set up a manufacturing deal in Japan and was soon selling shoes faster than they could come off the assembly line. “With the Cortez’s cushioning, we were in a monopoly position probably into the Olympic year, 1972,” Knight would gloat. By the time other companies geared up to copy the new shoe, the Swoosh was a world power.
Delighted with the reaction to his amateur designs, Bowerman let his creativity take off. He contemplated a waterproof shoe made of fish skin, but let that one die on the drawing board. He did come out with the LD-1000 Trainer, a shoe with a sole so wide it was like running on pie plates. Bowerman figured it would kill pronation in its tracks, overlooking the fact that unless the runner’s foot was perfectly straight, the flared heel would wrench his leg. “Instead of stabilizing, it accelerated pronation and hurt both feet and ankles,” former Oregon runner Kenny Moore reported in his biography of Bowerman. The shoe that was supposed to give you a perfect stride, in other words, only worked if you already had one. When Bowerman realized he was causing injuries instead of preventing them, he had to backtrack and narrow the heel in later versions.
Back in New Zealand, meanwhile, an appalled Arthur Lydiard was watching the flashy exports flooding out of Oregon and wondering what in the world his friend was up to. Compared with Bowerman, Lydiard was by far the superior track mind; he’d coached many more Olympic champions and world-record holders, and he’d created a training program that remains the gold standard. Lydiard liked Bill Bowerman and respected him as a coach, but good God! What was this junk he was selling?
Lydiard knew all this pronation stuff was just marketing gibberish. “If you told the average person of any age to take off his or her shoes and run down the hallway you would almost always discover the foot action contains no hint of pronation or supination,” Lydiard complained. “Those sideways flexings of the ankles begin only when people lace themselves into these running shoes because the construction of many of the shoes immediately alters the natural movement of the feet.
“We ran in canvas shoes,” Lydiard went on. “We didn’t get plantar fascia, we didn’t pronate or supinate, we might have lost a bit of skin from the rough canvas when we were running marathons, but, generally speaking, we didn’t have foot problems. Paying several hundred dollars for the latest in high-tech running shoes is no guarantee you’ll avoid any of these injuries and can even guarantee that you will suffer from them in one form or another.”
Eventually, even Bowerman was stricken by doubt. As Nike steamrolled along, churning out a bewildering variety of shoes and changing models every year for no reason besides having something else to sell, Bowerman felt his original mission of making an honest shoe had been eroded by a new ideology, which he summed up in two words: “Make money.” Nike, he griped in a letter to a colleague, was “distributing a lot of crap.” Even to one of Nike’s founding partners, it seemed, the words of the social critic Eric Hoffer were ringing true: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.”
Bowerman had died by the time the barefoot uprising was taking hold in 2002, so Nike went back to Bowerman’s old mentor to see if this shoeless stuff really had merit. “Of course!” Arthur Lydiard reportedly snorted. “You support an area, it gets weaker. Use it extensively, it gets stronger…. Run barefoot and you don’t have all those troubles.
“Shoes that let your foot function like you’re barefoot—they’re the shoes for me,” Lydiard concluded.
Nike followed up that blast with its own hard data. Jeff Pisciotta, the senior researcher at Nike Sports Research Lab, assembled twenty runners on a grassy field and filmed them running barefoot. When he zoomed in, he was startled by what he found: instead of each foot clomping down as it would in a shoe, it behaved like an animal with a mind of its own—stretching, grasping, seeking the ground with splayed toes, gliding in for a landing like a lake-bound swan.
“It’s beautiful to watch,” a still spellbound Pisciotta later told me. “That made us start thinking that when you put a shoe on, it starts to take over some of the control.” He immediately deployed his team to gather film of every existing barefoot culture they could find. “We found pockets of people all over the globe who are still running barefoot, and what you find is that during propulsion and landing, they have far more range of motion in the foot and engage more of the toe. Their feet flex, spread, splay, and grip the surface, meaning you have less pronation and more distribution of pressure.”
Faced with the almost inescapable conclusion that it had been selling lemons, Nike shifted into make-lemonade mode. Jeff Pisciotta became head of a top-secret and seemingly impossible project: finding a way to make a buck off a naked foot.
It took two years of work before Pisciotta was ready to unveil his masterpiece. It was presented to the world in TV ads that showed so many barefoot athletes—Kenyan marathoners padding along a dirt trail, swimmers curling their toes around a starting block, gymnasts and Brazilian capoeira dancers and rock climbers and wrestlers and karate masters and beach soccer players—that after a while, it was hard to remember who does wear shoes, or why.
Flashing over the images were motivational messages: “Your feet are your foundation. Wake them up! Make them strong! Connect with the ground…. Natural technology allows natural motion…. Power to your feet.” Across the sole of a bare foot is scrawled “Performance Starts Here.” Then comes the grand finale: as “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” crescendos in the background, we cut back to those Kenyans, whose bare feet are now sporting some kind of thin little shoe. It’s the new Nike Free, a swooshed slipper even thinner than the old Cortez.
And its slogan?
“Run Barefoot.”