By the headline, I thought this would be about ballet shoes.

If you grew up running barefoot, you tend to land on your forefoot. If not, wearing anything on your feet makes it much harder to train yourself to not slam down on your heel. If you like to run (I don't), you wear anything, or nothing, that empirically reduces pain or injury for you (and plenty of long-distance runners who run on pavement have been able to minimize injuries running barefoot versus shoes; some try and have to go back).

Those of us who sometimes hike barefoot shake our heads at the vast proliferation of "barefoot" shoes and the blog-miles devoted to them.

Oh lord. When will this Paleo-whatever silliness stop.

Cavemen lived to be thirty. If they were lucky. When a cavemen punctured his or her foot on a sharp rock they got infections and died. When they twisted their ankles running, they risked starvation. And. So the very second foot wear was invented "cavemen" god damned wore them.

You know how in war movies, where the winners of a battle are picking through the belongings of the dead? What is it they always do? Steal the boots. Yeah.

Anyway. I worked out barefoot for over twenty years (in Thai boxing, not running). Yes. There were some benefits to balance and proprioceptive feedback. But there was also constant injuries, fractures, and constant plantar fasciitis issues. Injuries I feel every day years later.

Wear shoes with proper cushioning, for fuck sake.

Prehistoric people weren't just running around in grassy meadows; there's a lot of hard ground out there. I'd suspect that many of the injuries people get from "barefoot shoes" has to do with just throwing them on and going running after a lifetime of being used to cushioned sneakers.

Here is an exercise. Name an olympic level elite competitive long distance runner who trains or competes barefoot? Go on.

Nope. Not even the infamous Kenyans do.

@5 Z-O-L-A ?

@4 OR maybe prehistoric people were not running all-out, miles and miles, every day all that often.

And maybe lots of them died from injuries when they did.

Maybe they did ambush hunting with long, slow, hikes punctuated by short sprints - like you see hunter gathers do now.

Maybe all these assumptions about what prehistoric people did or didn't do to run (or eat or screw or what ever) are total projection nonsense.

Zola Budd? HAHAHA.

Firstly: Budd was a mid-distance runner.

Secondly: Neatly thirty years ago. In 1986.

Thirdly: She was plagued by injuries.

Yes. Barefoot training was such a competitive advantage that everybody emulated her starting an avalanche of bare foot elite runners... oh wait... no.

Even the Kenyans wear shoes.

This conversation is useless without knowing the relative injury rates between Vibrams and traditional shoes. Most long distance runners I know who wear regular shoes are constantly getting injured even with all that cushioning. This lawsuit wasn't about an increased risk of injury, it's about false advertising.

Prehistoric people didn't run for FUN (ugh). There's a reason for the saying "Fight or flight", namely imminent danger.

I think running/jogging is stupid. The sports shoe industry is a disgusting luxury of our Capitalist system.

Socialism Forever! Sawant for President!

@3 You beat me to it. That's exactly what I think every time someone tell me, "This is healthy because the cavemen did it .."

They died at 30. If that old.

@7, successful hunting was always pretty rare amongst paleo people. More of an occasional occasion for a feast than a regular source of protein. The most common source of protein was insects, grubs and bugs and stuff, and small critters like rats and snakes, maybe a bird or two (and lots and lots of berries, leaves, and roots).

What's funny is "paleo diet" people eating vast quantities of bacon and steak. Those animals did not exist then. I think auroch meat is pretty hard to come by these days.

A friend came to visit my husband and me. He's a yoga instructor with a tendency toward self-righteousness. He kept going on and on about the evils of shoes and the benefits of going barefoot. Then, when walking across our back yard, he injured himself when he stepped on a shard of a nutshell that the squirrels had left behind. I felt schadenfreude.

Well, my personal anecdote is that using the Vibram shoes helped, in conjunction with certain exercises (not running), correct some balance/posture/joint stuff for me. I never thought the shoes on their own did much beyond forcing my feet bones to be in alignment. Also, because I don't run in them, they have lasted forever. So, I feel good about the purchase.

I feel the same way about my Birkenstocks and Earth shoes...

What the hell is this "not even the Kenyans do" shit? You think Africans live in grass huts and make fire by rubbing two sticks together or something?

@5: On the gawker article about this someone trolled beautifully by asking why the Kenyans ran barefoot, and getting a ridiculous number of people explaining why they thought the Kenyans did.

@3, 16, fun fact: on average, it's much worse to step on a sharp object in the environment (nail, thorn, etc.) while wearing shoes than when barefoot. Why? Anaerobic bacteria like Pseudomonas aeruginosa thrive in the trillions in the foul, fetid interior of shoes, particularly the foam midsoles of sports shoes, and puncturing objects carry some of those into the foot. In this study of 44 nondiabetic children admitted to hospital for puncture wounds of the foot, none of the 17 kids who were barefoot at the time of their injuries developed a bone infection, and none of the infections they did get were due to Pseudomonas. Among the 22 kids wearing tennis shoes at the time of injury, 7 had bone infections (osteomyelitis) and 10 of the total bone and soft-tissue infections were due to Pseudomonas.

Yes, romanticizing "Paleo"-anything is stupid, but that doesn't mean we always need to meet the world fully armored and awash in disinfectants.

@15,

The paleo diet promotes eating low fat protein, not bacon and rarely steak. Those "paleo" eaters you cite are like Atkins fanatics who think the diet is carte blanche to drink cream straight out of the carton; it's not.

One of my all-time favorite movies, "Atanarjuat." Saw it because of The Stranger review in 2002. Features a long barefoot run on ice tundra.

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/stran…

@18 Christ, shit-for-brains, is this all you do all day?

It is a common mythical trope among barefooters that one time a Kenyan marathoner won the olympics barefoot so - therefore- everybody should run barefoot.

But I guess one would have to live a life outside of the on-line outrage bubble 24/7 to know that.

@21 The paleo diet promotes baseless pseudo-scientific hokum to credulous dolts.

@23,

I didn't realize a diet based on low fat protein and huge quantities of fruit and vegetables was "pseudo-scientific".

No one has pointed out that regardless of the possible health benefits/side effects, wearing a pair of toe-shoes is the single easiest way to look completely ridiculous ever invented.

@23 If that is what the "paleo" diet was then it would just be called "eating a balanced diet," but it is not.

The "paleo" has also sorts of prohibitions on legumes and grains based on no scientific facts what so ever. They play fast and loose with the concept of inflammatory response some people have with some grains and then throw aside any and all reason by wildly assuming that effect applies to everybody. It does not.

The falseness of it's fundamental conceit is that it's "paleo" at all, or that in being "paleo" it has any sort of advantage over anything "non-paleo."

Pseudo-scientific nonsense.

@20 Fun fact:

You don't get near the number of puncture wounds to your feet if you wear shoes.

but that doesn't mean we always need to meet the world fully armored and awash in disinfectants

Yes. I agree. And nobody has even come close saying this here.

@28: You don't get near the number of paper cuts, knuckle scrapes, splinters, blisters, etc. on your hands if you wear gloves at all times. But doing so would be very frustrating, confining, sense-deadening for most people, and so they take a calculated risk every day for all but the most extreme circumstances.

Some people do the same with regard to footwear. It's part of the spectrum of human variation.

@29 Okay. You've ceased making any sort of logical sense.

You don't walk on your hands 24/7. And gravity tends to adhere things to the ground. Detritus. Shit. Broken glass. You know. Where your feet are.

People who use their hands for the type of hard labor that may make their hands vulnerable to injury (the kind of impact that would be common if you ran around barefoot all the time) actually DO wear gloves. Or we wouldn't HAVE work gloves.

Every culture, every society, wears footwear when ever they can get it. For a reason.

You want to hike around barefoot. Great. Do it. Nobody is telling you not to.

I still exercise about 50% of the time barefoot. There are some things like prioproception and balance - that it will enhance.

But I don't lay claim it is in anyway superior to being shod and that there are not risks and trade-offs. Becasue there are.

The barefoot running crowd made claims of explicit superiority to being shod that were scientifically tenuous and medically irresponsible.

I honestly have no idea what you're arguing about anymore.

OH MY GOD YOU GUYS STOP SHOUTING

Paul, what the fuck could you possibly, conceivably know about running? Have you ever run? You couldn't run a block to catch a doughnut. Your beat is politics and books. Stick to it. You SUUUUCK when it comes to covering tech, and god help us, sports.

BTW, I don't wear toe shoes, never have. So I'm not pissy because I'm defensive, I'm pissy because Paul drives me insane when he speaks authoritatively about which he knows nothing.

I look forward to his next piece about how the Seahawk's defensive alignment is all wrong.