Science and sceptical runners are catching up with something the Tarahumara Indians have known for ever: your naked feet are fine on their own. According to a growing body of clinical research, those expensive running shoes you’ve been relying on may be worse than useless: they could be causing the very injuries they’re supposed to prevent.
Perhaps the best research in the field has been going on for hundreds of years in a maze of canyons in northern Mexico. There, the reclusive Tarahumara tribe routinely engage in races of 150 miles or more, the equivalent of running the London Marathon six times in the same day. Despite this extreme mileage, as I learnt during several treks into the canyons, the Tarahumara are somehow immune to the injuries that plague the rest of the running world.
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Out here in the non-Tarahumara world, where we have access to the best in sports medicine, training innovations and footwear, up to 90 per cent of all marathoners are injured every year. The Tarahumara, by contrast, remain spry and healthy deep into old age. I saw numerous men and women in their seventies loping up steep, cliffside switchbacks on their way to villages 30 miles away. Back in 1994, a Tarahumara man ventured out of the canyons to compete against an elite field of runners at the Leadville Trail Ultramarathon, a 100-mile race through the Rocky Mountains. He wore homemade sandals. He was 55 years old. He won.
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So how do the Tarahumara protect their legs from all that pounding? Simple – they don’t. They don’t protect and, most critically, they don’t pound. When the Tarahumara aren’t barefoot, they wear nothing more cushioned than thin, hard sandals fashioned from discarded tire treads and leather thongs. In place of artificial shock absorption, they rely on an ancient running technique that creates a naturally gentle landing. Unlike the vast majority of modern runners, who come down heavily on their foam-covered heels and roll forward off their toes, the Tarahumara land lightly on their forefeet and bend their knees, as you would if you jumped from a chair.
This ingenious, easy-to-learn style could have a profound effect on runners, not to mention the multi-billion dollar running-shoe industry. Ever since Nike created the modern running shoe in the Seventies, new joggers have been repeatedly warned that their first step should be through the door of a speciality store. Without proper footwear, they’re told, crippling injuries are inevitable. Take this recent comment by Dr Lewis G Maharam, "the world’s premier running physician" as he’s known, and medical director for the New York City Marathon. "In 95 per cent of the population or higher, running barefoot will land you in my office," Maharam said. That’s because only "a very small number of people are biomechanically perfect."
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Shortly before the New York City Marathon, David Willey, the editor of Runner’s World magazine, broadcast a similarly dire warning on the radio. "If a lot of runners or all the runners out there in America did that tomorrow [ran without shoes], the vast majority of them would get hurt very quickly and would have to stop running for a long time." And why? Because, Willey said, "the vast majority of people are not blessed in that way. They’ve got some biomechanical inefficiencies."
This logic has at least one major flaw: the vast majority of runners, "blessed" or otherwise, are getting hurt anyway. The injury rate among all runners has hovered somewhere between 60 and 80 per cent for the past 40 years. You’d expect casualties to decrease as technology improved, but you’d be wrong: there are more heel and Achilles’ tendon injuries now than ever, even though Adidas sells a trainer with a microprocessor in the sole to customise cushioning, and Asics spent $3 million, 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" and an "infinitely adaptable heel component".
Astonishingly, there’s no evidence that any of this technology does anything, which may explain why Nike ads never explain what, exactly, those $190 shoes are supposed to do. In a 2008 research paper for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Dr Craig Richards, a physician at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed that after scouring 30 years’ worth of studies, he couldn’t find a single one that demonstrated that running shoes made you less prone to injury.
So if shoes aren’t the solution, could they be the problem? That’s what Dr Daniel Lieberman, the head of the evolutionary anthropology department at Harvard, began to wonder. Humans, after all, are the only creatures that voluntarily cover their feet, and we’re also the only creatures known to suffer from corns, bunions, hammer-toes and heel pain.
January 13, 2010
