Footloose and fancy-free or just barefoot lies

ATHLETICS:MY ACCOUNTANT called down from Glencullen on Thursday night, totally unannounced, with the look of a man who had experienced a major epiphany. "I've just thrown my runners in the bin," he said. "All six pairs. It's barefoot running from now on. I swear to God. I'm sick of getting injured. They've done tons of research on this, and the bloody runners are to blame. I ran three miles this morning in my bare feet. The difference was incredible."

Some of you may remember my accountant from such tales as the Reggae Marathon (which he ran off zero training) or his obsession with Steve Prefontaine (who he considers the greatest runner EVER). Truth is he does have a tendency towards the extreme, particularly when it comes to running. I once told him he needed to do more hills to build up endurance, and two days later he ran the entire Wicklow Way. He’s also heavily addicted to caffeine, B vitamins, liquid iron and several other reportedly performance-enhancing substances.

Normally, I simply nod in agreement at whatever new training method he suggests; even that time he claimed running backwards was the secret to curing an Achilles tendon injury. But believe it or not, he is actually on to something this time. Running barefoot is the most natural and beneficial way to go, although it's not quite as straightforward as it sounds. (Actually, I once started a book, Everything You Always Wanted to know about Barefoot Running but Were Afraid to Ask– although I never got around to finishing it.)

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said, to which my accountant replied: “Well why aren’t you writing about it? I keep telling you, man, you’re losing it. You used to be cutting edge.”

That may be true, but there's nothing particularly "cutting edge" about running barefoot. Remember Abebe Bikila? On September 10th, 1960, he won the Olympic marathon over the cobbled streets of Rome, in his bare feet; the first black African to win a gold medal at the Olympics. Long before that, in 1935, the veteran athlete Arthur Newton published Running, in which he championed barefoot running, and the importance of landing on the flats of the feet, rather than the heels. Newton's ideas were adopted by Percy Cerutty, among others, who instilled the benefits of barefoot running into his students, including the great Herb Elliott.

And how could we forget Zola Budd? In a book I did finish, Catherina McKiernan; Running For My Life, there's a lovely story about her breakthrough victory at the Irish Schools Cross Country, in Dungarvan, in 1988, which McKiernan ran in her bare feet. She was asked afterwards by Brendan O'Reilly, the late RTÉ commentator, why she wasn't wearing any shoes, to which McKiernan replied "because shoes felt too clobby".

This week, in Nature– the international weekly journal of science – Harvard researcher Daniel Lieberman published a fairly comprehensive study entitled: "Foot strike patterns and collision forces in habitually barefoot versus shod runners." In other words, how running barefoot compares to running in runners. Lieberman studied five groups of runners, from the US and Kenya, dividing them between those who grew up running barefoot, those who grew up running in runners, and those who've switched to one or the other.

The results, which weren’t at all surprising, showed the barefoot runners typically landed more naturally, on the fore foot, while those wearing runners typically landed on the rear foot, encouraged by the elevated and cushioned heel of the modern running shoe. More importantly, the barefoot runners generated smaller collision forces than those wearing runners, and this, the study suggested, “may protect the feet and lower limbs from some of the impact-related injuries now experienced by a high percentage of runners”.

In expanding on this, Lieberman says that “by landing on the middle or front of the foot, barefoot runners have almost no impact collision, much less than most runners in shoes generate when they heel-strike” – and therefore running in runners is “like someone hitting you on the heel with a hammer, about one and a half to three times your body weight”. This is essentially suggesting running barefoot is about three times less damaging than running in runners.

Lieberman is certainly not alone in his findings; there have been numerous other studies in recent years to suggest barefoot running reduces foot impact. Likewise, in 2008, the British Journal of Sports Medicinereported that after scouring 30 years' worth of research, a Dr Craig Richards couldn't find a single study that demonstrated running shoes made you less prone to injury. And another study last year, at the University of Virginia, suggested that running in runners puts more strain on the joints than walking in high-heeled shoes. Ouch!

Something else which has contributed to this barefoot phenomenon – and apparently helped convert my accountant – is the book Born To Run, published last year, by Christopher McDougall. He spent several months in Mexico's Copper Canyon with the Tarahumara Indians, who he reckons are the best long-distance runners in the world, routinely engaging in races of 150 miles or more. He says their secret is running barefoot, or else in very thin rubber soles. Born To Runwas the best-selling running book of 2009 – and may well be the best book about running that I've never read, but tell me something I don't know.

In any case, like most evidently great discoveries, there is a catch. Running barefoot may reduce the impact on your foot, but unless you grew up running this way, preferably along dusty roads, it will very quickly and very seriously murder your ankles and calf muscles. You might get away with it for a couple of days, but years of wearing runners will have weakened other areas of the leg, probably to the point of no return. Just as prohibitively, most roads and footpaths around Ireland are brutally uneven and littered with broken glass – or worse – which not even Abebe Bikila would have fancied running on.

To find out if the running shoe business is worried about the claims of Lieberman et al, I called up Damian McKeever, manager of the specialists running shop Amphibian King, in Bray. “A lot of the time, we take runners out of these big, bulky shoes that they go on about in these studies, and actually put them into a more minimalist shoe,” he told me. “So I do think there is something to barefoot running. Most of the good athletes are light on their feet anyway, and don’t need the top end runners.

“But none of these studies really recommend you throw your runners away, and suddenly go barefoot. It’s okay if you’re bio-mechanically very efficient, but for example we have former rugby players come into us, at 34, 35, who are say 16st, and have signed up to run a marathon. If we put them in light runners then nine times out of 10 they’ll get injured. And I really don’t think it would be a good idea for them to run barefoot.”

It may be that over the years to come we will all return to our natural and most beneficial way of running, which is barefoot, but it won’t happen overnight. In the meantime, I fully expect my accountant to call around this weekend, telling me he’s just pulled his runners out of the bin, and do I fancy a run up to Cruagh Wood.