My Kindle told me to do it

Tomorrow I'm going to hit the treadmill during my lunch break. And I'm going to do it barefoot.

Running barefoot? As my cousin asked me... "why in the world would you want to do that?" Why indeed? Two reasons. First - I got a Kindle for Christmas. Second, I don't like long needles - especially when they're filled with cortisone and poking their way into my heel. Let me back up a bit. The other day, I was sitting on Prague's Tram #20 on the way home from work, and I was looking for something new to read. Christopher McDougall's "Born to Run" caught my eye, and, thanks to the wonders of Amazon's "Whispernet," a couple clicks, $11.98, and a two tram stops later, I was hooked.

McDougall starts off the book asking a pretty basic question - "How come my foot hurts?" If you're an average recreational runner, you've probably asked the yourself the same question. In fact, McDougall claims that up to eight out of ten runners just like us get hurt every year. I'm one of those eight.

I started picking up my mileage when I moved to Prague a couple years ago and found out that running four miles was one of the quickest ways to get to work each day (as long as the streets aren't covered with a mix of ice, salt and weeks-old frozen snow snot as they are now). By running to work, I could beat the drivers, appreciate the scenery (there's LOTS of it in Prague!) and got a workout in - all while commuting! Only problem? A couple years ago, out of the blue, my left heel starts hurting.

It wasn't constant... but it did get worse - to the point where in the middle of a run, I'd start hobbling until I shook my ankle a certain way and the pain would vanish. My doc took one look at my swollen heel and quickly figured out that I had chronically swollen bursa sacs - the little cushions that shield your Achilles tendon where it gets plugged into your heel bone.

The cause? I pronate (twist my foot inward) when I run. All that twisting motion, coupled with the stress of repeatedly driving your full body weight into your foot a couple hundred times each mile doesn't bode well for the fairly delicate combination of bones, tendons and jelly-filled baloons that comprise your foot. The plan - stop the pronation by inserting custom molded orthodics (inserts) into my running shoes. Strengthen and stretch the foot with six months of physical therapy. Hot lava stones, ultrasound therapy and cute exercises made the clinic happy, but didn't help the heel situation a bit. The therapist did look at me oddly when I would show up for my appointments in my running or bike gear, having just jogged or cycled in from work!

Which brings me to the needle filled with cortisone. I was tired of popping ibuprofens before my daily commute. My inserts and therapy weren't helping. And I had a triathlon and a 10K to run in a couple months! After six months of failed inserts and therapy, the doc suggested I was ready to try "stage two" - cortisone shots. I thought my heel pain was bad before the shot? Let me tell you - a shot of cortisone isn't the most enjoyable experience. But after a night of a heel that felt like it was going to burn a hole through the sheets, the pain... was GONE. I could run the cobblestones streets of Prague what felt like new feet! I could run "normal" again - without having to do the weird combination of gyrations that somehow let me favor a inflamed bursa in my shoe! Until a couple months later, when the heel pain slowly but surely worked its way back and settled in to my daily commute again. And so began my love-hate relationship with the needle. Every four to five months, I'd return for a tune-up of my orthotics and a top-up of cortisone. Until I finally got tired of the whole thing and decided to settle for ibuprofen and get used to the pain.

So there I was on the Tram, with my Kindle reading about McDougall's experience... and it sounded eerily familiar. His story meanders through the desolate and extreme Copper Canyons of Mexico where he encounters members of the Tarahumara tribe. Legendary for their endurance, the Tarahumara are known as hunters who quite literally run their quarry to death chasing their prey until it drops from exhaustion. They do all this running in thin leather sandals. In some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. And they don't have swollen bursa sacs. Or Achilles tendinitis. Or shin splints. Or plantar faciitis - or any of the array of injuries that plague all but 20% of today's runners. Why not?

I don't want to read the whole book to you online - it's too good a read for you to miss out on. But long story short, McDougall traces the rise in running injuries to something very interesting... the invention of the modern running shoe! Before the early 70's - just about every runner shod his or her feet with something much more similar to the Tarahumara Huarache sandal than today's running shoe.

If you have a running shoe - run over and grab it real quick. They come in all shapes, sizes and designs, of course - but almost all of them have something in common. About an inch or so of foam, padding, rubber, airsacs or even spring-loaded suspension systems under the heel. Run in running shoes, and your natural inclination is for your well padded heel to hit the ground first. You then roll to the ball of your feet, lift off, and repeat. Believe it or not, that's not how you used to run.

I asked my two year old to run around for me in his new "wunning soos" the other night and he did something very interesting. He ran around as if he was barefoot - slapping the balls of his feet down first, and just barely touching his heel to the ground. He hasn't been "taught" by his shoes yet to run any way other than how his body is telling him to. Now try an experiment. Take off your shoes and run across the room. Odds are, you'll run the same way as a two year old! Without the heel padding of a modern running shoe, it just hurts to drive your heel into the ground at the beginning of every step. If you don't happen to have access to toddlers or running shoes - check out the video below, which illustrates the problem pretty clearly.

When you're running, each step can put an impact of as much as twelve times your body weight on your foot. For someone like me - that's over a ton of impact power hitting each foot... each step. And with my heel down and toes up as in the video above, my Achilles tendon is stretched even tighter between the "airbags" into my heel bone. I'm just surprised I didn't start feeling tweaks a couple hundred miles ago.

Impact aside - the thick heel of a running shoe puts your actual heel about an inch of the ground. No matter how much "motion control" the shoe has built in to it, you're foot's much more likely to do weird twists, turns and pronations as you balance the mass of your body on the impact of each elevated foot.

Take away the heel support of the modern running shoe and your body tells you to run like a toddler - and to and each step the way your foot is meant to. Look at it for a sec... it's like a natural shock absorber all by itself. Land on the meaty ball of your foot, and your arch's natural suspension system takes up the shock, and rebounds the force you've just put into it back up into another step. Amazing!

Which is all a very roundabout way of explaining why it is that the combination of my Kindle and a long needle is going to get me running on a treadmill barefoot tomorrow. Maybe this idea's not worth the $11.98 it cost to download the book. But it sure makes sense... and it can't be much worse than another shot, can it?