Bramley Famli

My knee experiment continues to be positive. Yesterday Leish and I did our longest run ever. 10km. Was a little nervous that my knee would act up and all this noise I’m making about barefoot running and injuries (or lack of them) would be set back. But nothing. Knee is in good shape this morning. Rest of my body is hurting, but my knee is all good.

To be clear, I’m not running barefoot yet. Everything I read suggests you take at least a month to ease into it. So I’m up to 1km of barefoot running, and then my shoes back on for the rest of the run. I’ve also got myself a pair of Vibram Five Fingers (much to many people’s amusement) and wear those wherever and whenever I can. The goal is to be barefoot or as close to barefoot as I can as often as possible.

This morning I’m following a link off of Twitter, with some more interesting reporting on the value of barefoot running, especially with regard to less injuries.

Running barefoot is associated with a substantially lower prevalence of acute injuries of the ankle and chronic injuries of the lower leg in developing countries, but well-designed studies of the effects of barefoot and shod running on injury are lacking. Laboratory studies show that the energy cost of running is reduced by about 4% when the feet are not shod. In spite of these apparent benefits, barefoot running is rare in competition, and there are no published controlled trials of the effects of running barefoot on simulated or real competitive performance.

Here’s a link to the full report by Michael Warburton, a physio from Australia. Makes for some interesting reading. He concludes his paper with the following:

Running in shoes appears to increase the risk of ankle sprains, either by decreasing awareness of foot position or by increasing the twisting torque on the ankle during a stumble.

Running in shoes appears to increase the risk of plantar fasciitis and other chronic injuries of the lower limb by modifying the transfer of shock to muscles and supporting structures.

Running in bare feet reduces oxygen consumption by a few percent.  Competitive running performance should therefore improve by a similar amount, but there has been no published research comparing the effect of barefoot and shod running on simulated or real competitive running performance.

Research is needed to establish why runners choose not to run barefoot. Concern about puncture wounds, bruising, thermal injury, and overuse injury during the adaptation period are possibilities.

Running shoes play an important protective role on some courses, in extreme weather conditions, and with certain pathologies of the lower limb.

Currently, running has my attention in a large way. To be honest it’s not as much the running, as what running stands for, that’s got me all focused and interested.

Some of it is the idea that shoes, in their current fancy form, are probably not good for any of us. So I’m trying to go barefoot wherever I can in order to see if the re-occurring knee injury I get from running, goes away faster, and whether it’ll come back?

Another bit is that if we were ‘born to run‘ and we’re not, what does that mean for us as a species? In the book I spoke about 3 posts earlier, I read that in societies where running is still practiced there is a far lower incidence of things like, cancer, anxiety, depression, and a whole host of modern illness.

In an article in the New York Times Health section, there’s some interesting research being showcased around running, anxiety and the impact of exercise on the human brain.

It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms.

There may be more to running than certainly I ever imagined. The long run to freedom continues…..