Writer Biography

Jared Capell was born in Port Angeles, Washington, and later moved to Meridian, Idaho. He enjoys reading, running, and learning new things. Capell is currently a Freshman (as of 2017) at Utah State majoring in Human Movement Science with an emphasis in Pre-Physical Therapy, and plans on furthering his education by attending medical school so he can help people live healthier, happier lives.

This essay was first published in the 2017 edition of Voices and uses MLA documentation.

AFTER THE ADVENT OF Christopher McDougal’s New York Times bestseller Born to Run, shoe companies from Nike to Vibram, magazines from Men’s Health to Runner’s World, and gait gurus from doctorates to amateurs have been up-in-arms in the Shoe vs. Barefoot debate. The opinions of the “experts” are often conflicting, some promoting one extreme and others promoting another extreme. Even the scientific literature and studies generated since this event have been contradictory, argumentative, and influenced on both sides by copious bias. After reviewing the literature, I argue that human beings, and children especially, should not wear shoes except when absolutely necessary in order to maintain health, human development, hygiene, and performance.

The 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. The marathon start is delayed due to the smoldering heat of the Italian summer. As the runners line up to start, some take notice of a skeletal figure who wears the Ethiopian racing vest, who seems to think that he can complete the 26.2-mile race without the aid of shoes, for he has presented himself barefoot at the starting line. Certainly, he won’t make it halfway before dropping out, after all, the race is to be run on asphalt and on the cobblestone streets of Rome. As the race begins, he is forgotten, but as it goes on he gradually makes his way to the leading pack… and stays there… and then passes it… and then outsprints the one Moroccan that dared keep up, to become the new marathon world record holder. Who is this man? His name is Abebe Bikila. If we change the venue, date, distance, and nationality, it could be Zola Budd, former world record holder in the 5000 meters, or Herb Elliot, former world record holder in the 1500 and the mile, or Faith Kipyegon, or Bruce Tulloh, or any number of athletes. What doesn’t change? Bare feet and fantastic athletic performance. Clearly in habituated individuals, bare feet are no obstacle to physical performance. (Watch Abebe Bikila’s 1960 Olympic barefoot run here.)

 In the beginning, we were barefoot. The oldest recorded shoe is from around 5,500 years ago and consists of little more than a fitted cowhide slipper. No raised heel, no midsole, just the foot and a leather slipper. For the majority of human history, this is the type of footwear that has dominated, in different styles of course, but always the same principle (Ravilious). Sandals, moccasins, huaraches, Inuit mukluks, and, of course, the bare human foot. Soon, shoes become a status symbol, and while poorer classes continue to wear (or not wear) traditional footwear styles through the Middle Ages, the wealthy, noble and prestigious turned to raised heels to elevate themselves above their inferiors. King Louis XIV of France even issued a decree that no one’s heels could be higher than his own. Because of this and the ensuing public mentality, as lower classes entered the bourgeoisie throughout the nineteenth century, they too wanted heeled shoes, which lead to the domination of raised-heel shoes in European footwear that has lasted for centuries (“Dangerous Elegance”). This style of shoe design is very bad for human beings. Besides causing abnormal foot loading and the atrophy and shortening of the lower leg muscles, it also forces the body to make a whole series of potentially harmful gait and postural adjustments from the ankles up to the neck in order to compensate for an uneven foundation (Cowley).  Fortunately this trend was absent from athletic shoes until the running boom of the 1970s, and Bill Bowerman’s invention of the modern athletic shoe (McDougall, “The Painful Truth”). Prior to this, athletic shoes of all sports consisted of little more than leather or canvas slippers that sometimes had a thin, flexible rubber outsole (Larson). Bowerman, track coach at the Univeristy of Oregon invented a shoe, the Nike Cortez, that would revolutionize the world of footwear. Bowerman’s design features a raised, cushioned heel, which he claimed would “reduce leg fatigue,” and “allow for gravity to push the runner ahead of his competitors,” as well as allow the runner to take a longer stride by facilitating landing on the heel. As a member of the 1972 Olympic coaching staff, Bowerman had a lot of influence and was able to equip the then-formidable American running team with the Cortez. With his Cortez and his Olympian representatives, Bowerman converted Nike from a garage project to a multi-billion dollar corporation overnight and the athletic shoe into a status symbol (“Nike Cortez”).

So, what’s wrong with that? The issue is that we are all buying a product predicated on fallacious reasoning, myths, and pseudoscience.

Advocates of athletic shoes claim, as did Bowerman, that shoes protect their wearers from impact and injury, and even claim that they can improve your performance (Dwilson). Unfortunately, these claims are objectively false. Harvard researchers found that the average shod runner generates sudden impact forces of up to three times their body weight, while habitually barefoot runners generated almost no sudden impact forces (Lieberman, “Foot Strike Patterns”). This is due to the safer, more efficient body mechanics that barefoot gait demands (Lieberman, “Variation in Foot Strike”). With regards to injury, over the last 40 years the running community has seen no statistical reduction in the rate of running injuries, despite great advances in athletic shoe technologies (Murphy). In fact, one of the only shoe-related factors that is correlated to injury rates is the price; those who wear more expensive shoes are 123% more likely to sustain an injury during a given period than those who wear less expensive shoes (Marti). When people believe that shoes offer impact protection they are less likely to use safe body mechanics, and consequently increase impact (Robbins). Since more expensive shoes rely heavily on this advertising, one can understand why their wearers would be injured more often. Many shoes and orthotics claim to correct some of these biomechanical anomalies, although leading researchers in orthotics state that orthotics and motion-control shoes do not correct faulty biomechanics, but rather facilitate incorrect mechanics by reducing pain in ways that are not understood and scientifically unexplainable (Kolkata). This observation lends itself to the speculation that the pain reduction caused by orthotics and motion-control shoes may be a result of the placebo effect. To be frank, no scientific literature (much less peer-reviewed) nor study indicates that any type of shoe can improve performance, which depends on too many variables to consider here.

So, then, how do bare feet compare? As noted earlier, being barefoot promotes impact-reducing mechanics. Also, barefoot locomotion is more efficient. Besides promoting more efficient mechanics, being barefoot eliminates extra weight that must be lifted, accelerated, and decelerated over and over again, which consumes energy and oxygen better spent in other ways (Cheung). Even seemingly minute differences in efficiency or running economy can impact performance enormously in long, endurance-based athletic events like basketball games or marathon running. Consider that world record holder Paula Radcliffe’s marathon running speed is only 2.3% greater than Mary Keitany’s, yet Keitany’s second-fastest women’s marathon ever run would finish three minutes and twelve seconds after Radcliffe, which even in the marathon is hardly a small margin of victory. Between 1992 and 2003, Radcliffe improved her running economy by 15%. Since running economy is the number-one predictor of performance and improvement in endurance running events, and is greatly influenced by footwear weight and body mechanics (especially the more efficient mechanics promoted by running unshod), barefootedness may help individuals who are accustomed to it to experience improved athletic performance (Jones 101).

When considering human development, especially in children, there are also several important differences between shod and barefoot living. Hallux valgus deformities, (a.k.a. bunions) which can interfere with normal foot mechanics as well as be painful and unsightly, are absent in surveys of habitually barefoot populations (Shulman). On the note of foot deformities, a study performed in India, and comprised of ethnically identical children, found that children who habitually wore closed-toe shoes were 471.43% more likely to present pes planus (flat foot) deformities than children who were habitually barefoot. Human beings are born flat-footed and the arch of the foot develops in early childhood. The researchers concluded, “Our findings suggest that shoe-wearing in early childhood is detrimental to the development of a normal longitudinal arch” (Rao). While being barefoot is not correlated with reduced injury rates, habitually barefoot individuals present far fewer cases of excessively high arches as well as fewer cases of excessively low or flat arches, and these extremes in arch height are correlated with increased injury risk (Williams). Therefore, being habitually barefoot, especially in developing children, may serve as a protective factor against injury by promoting the development of arches that are neither high nor low, thus avoiding the increased risk of injury to which these two groups are predisposed. Furthermore, fungal and bacterial infections of the skin and nails of the feet are also rare among habitually barefoot individuals because their feet are allowed to dry and are frequently exposed to sunlight, which has fungicidal and bactericidal properties (Knight). One of the most important benefits of being habitually barefoot is the neuromuscular feedback received from the 200,000+ nerve endings in the feet that improves proprioception, balance, and promotes the establishment of functional gait patterns. This is especially important in childhood, seeing as gait is mastered in childhood and movement patterns are set into muscle memory that can be difficult to overwrite. Shoes interfere in this neuromuscular development and are one of the main causes of gait abnormalities (Crawford). Because shoes frequently disrupt normal human development in these ways, it is not a good idea for adults, much less children, to spend much time in shoes.

If being barefoot really provides all these benefits, why are you or I still wearing shoes? Obviously, shoes provide protection from cuts, abrasions, frostbite, and burns, but most people spend a relatively small amount of their time on substrates that pose these risks. One reason why we still faithfully wear shoes is the 1970s anti-counter-culture movement. The hippies became associated with bare feet (a product of counter-culture dogmas and ideologies), which lead to bare feet being associated with other anti-society counter-culture behaviors, including homelessness, extremist liberalism, and drug addiction, among others. This resulted in the widespread “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” notices posted at the entrances of businesses and institutions that used bare feet as a discriminatory measure against the counter-culture (Capell). In this way, bare feet were now not only stigmatized by their centuries-old association with poverty but also by their association with the counter-culture and its ills. Furthermore, Bowerman’s contemporary invention revolutionized the way people looked at footwear. After hundreds of years of relatively little development in the way of footwear, suddenly athletic shoes were technological. Shoes had reasoning behind them, and innovation, and mad scientist-like waffle-iron-in-the-garage experiments to create a technologically advanced shoe; a shoe that would later have air pockets in the sole, and motion-control design, and energy-return foams, and carbon fiber spring plates, among other innovations. The public often swallows up this kind of advertising. Consumers often trust the experts and their scientific advancements so much that they don’t realize that the experts are inventing the science they need to sell their product. The public doesn’t notice that the only people who are “shoe experts” are those that sell the product. A recent study by the University of Colorado found that while barefoot running is more efficient than traditional shod running, the best efficiency was achieved while wearing ultra-light racing flats (Franz). The study does not hesitate to mention that the ultra-light racing flats featured are Nike Mayflys, a techy $69.00 shoe that often tears during their first use, sometimes not lasting more than one race. It also contradicts the findings of a meta-analysis of 19 studies that found that running barefoot is slightly more efficient (Cheung). Because athletic shoe companies conduct or fund many investigative studies regarding footwear, biases tend to appear in the literature and often contradict the findings of studies conducted by independent institutions. Even magazines like Runner’s World fall victim to the distortion of bias. Since the magazine makes the majority of its revenue from shoe advertisements (and once had a bad go of it after criticizing Nike’s shoe construction and temporarily losing its advertising contract with Nike) they have since been very careful to recommend shoe styles and models to all runners and only publish either ambiguous or pro-shoe material (McDougall, “The Once and Future Way to Run”), thus the best interests of the public are subverted by corporate and media agendas that seek to maintain a multi-billion dollar annual revenue status quo, despite research that indicates that “…The current practice of prescribing distance running shoes featuring elevated cushioned heels and pronation control systems tailored to the individual’s foot type… is not evidence-based” (Richards).

As false as the athletic shoe industry may seem, it would be incorrect to assume that the barefoot crowd is without its cankers. Barefooters, as they are called, often promote being barefoot as a way to prevent injury, run naturally, and improve performance, and invite all others to do as they have done (McDougall, “Born to Run”). While the majority of scientific evidence sustains bare feet as a healthier alternative, there has been almost no research done on the transition of habitually shod individuals to a barefoot lifestyle, and no studies can substantiate the claims that running barefoot reduces injury rates. In fact, injury rates and risks may be greater while transitioning than continuing shod (Murphy). The cure-all doctrine preached by barefooters often results in the naïve sustaining serious injuries to their metatarsals and Achilles tendons as they attempt to adopt a barefoot lifestyle overnight. However, gradual, slow transition and re-development of poorly or underdeveloped foot and lower leg tissues can and has occurred for many individuals, and is definitely possible (McDougall, “Born to Run”). Wearing shoes only when absolutely necessary will allow people to enjoy the benefits of  barefoot living, but “absolutely necessary” may mean something different for everyone, especially while transitioning. For those who grew up without shoes, or for the very accustomed, this might mean wearing shoes only at social functions where bare feet are not acceptable, or shower shoes at a public pool, whereas for someone who is just beginning to transition, this may mean starting by spending more time barefoot indoors before advancing to more difficult surfaces.

In my point of view, I would argue that human beings, and especially children, should not wear shoes except when absolutely necessary for health, hygiene, and developmental reasons. Traditions, stigmas, cultural norms, and lack of knowledge have often been sources of decreased personal, family, community, national and world health, but they don’t need to be. When people investigate, compare the evidence, make sound decisions, and live their decisions in their lives, they can receive the benefits. Will you?

Works Cited

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