As he turned 53, Decatur writer Jim Harmon assumed his memories of running — pushing his body for miles in a zone of exhilaration — were past history, part of his young adulthood.
Despite well-fitted size-9 1/2 shoes, Harmon couldn’t run more than two miles without hip and leg pain and winded breathing.
One episode of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” though, gave Harmon a new route to pain-free running and led him into one of the sport’s hotter and more hotly argued trends: barefoot/minimalist running.
On the show was author and runner Chris McDougall, who wrote the bestseller “Born to Run” about his experiences with the Tarahumara, a Mexican tribe of shoeless, jubilant distance runners. He solved his own running pain by shedding his traditional shoes. On rugged terrain, he favored the Vibram FiveFingers, a thin rubberized shoe molded to all five toes.
His story found a foothold in Harmon. Before buying himself the shoes for his birthday, Harmon found a vacant softball field where he ran, for the first time since childhood, barefoot.
“I felt so good. I felt younger. I felt stronger. I felt exhilarated. It was like a revelation to run like that,” he recalled. “I watched every step where I was landing, and that gave me the sense of being in a zone. I ran, and I did not hurt anymore.”
Amid the 60,000 entrants in Monday’s The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race, an increasing number will sport “toe shoes” now marketed by several manufacturers. Other runners, such as Tamara “TJ” Gerken, a mother of two from Coweta County, will wear no shoes at all.
Gerken will represent the Barefoot Runners Society, her worldwide network of 2,700 similar believers in every U.S. state and Asia, Europe, Africa and Australia. Of those, 115 are in Georgia, mostly around the Perimeter.
“At the Peachtree, I get called Zola Budd sometimes,” said Gerken, 44, referring to the shoeless South African star. “People say, ‘Hey, that’s hard-core,’ but that’s not what I’m trying to do. I have no choice but to run this way.”
Her story is similar to others in her club who, in a last-ditch effort to keep running, left their shoes behind. She suffers from Morton’s neuroma, a thickening of nerve tissue between the toes. Terry Hagan of Dacula, 49, suffered chronic tendinitis in his ankles and could run no more than 10 miles per week.
“Before quitting running and surgery, I tried going barefoot, and it worked,” he said.
Hagan now logs up to 40 miles per week and has run a 19-minute 5K (3.1 miles) barefoot — and skipped surgery.
Traveling by foot 6.2 miles, with little to no foot cushion, makes Peachtree medical co-director Perry Julien wince. “With glass and metal on the road, you can hurt yourself very badly,” he said. “Our environment is not the jungles of Mexico.”
Julien has seen a growing number of patients at his podiatry practice with stress fractures, pain in the ball of a foot or Achilles, or plantar fasciitis (a common ailment) because they ran too far too soon in a minimalist shoe.
“People say, ‘But that shoe can’t hurt me. It’s helping me!” Julien said. “‘Then why are you in my office?’ I say. Within one to two weeks of changing their shoes, they stop having problems. ... My guess is that these shoes have a place for a very small percentage of runners, but saying these will change your life is a dangerous statement. ”
The attraction of this shoe, as Julien sees it, is that runners want a funky looking shoe that offers a transcendent experience such as yoga.
“These shoes do make you more careful when you strike the ground, and that puts less stress on your body and absorbs the shock better,” he said. “You can run lightly in conventional shoes as well.”
In response to these shoes, and wearing no shoes at all, the American Podiatric Medical Association released this warning:
“Barefoot running has been touted as improving strength and balance, while promoting a more natural running style. However, risks of barefoot running include a lack of protection — which may lead to injuries such as puncture wounds — and increased stress on the lower extremities. Currently, inconclusive scientific research has been conducted regarding the benefits and/or risks of barefoot running.”
Runners such as Harmon, who accumulates most of his mileage in minimalist shoes, also draw criticism from the true “barefooters.” To them, toe shoes are like bathing suits in a nudist colony — why bother?
“If you run barefoot first, you lessen the chance of injury later,” Gerken said. “In the Third World, going barefoot has been done since man stood upright. It’s new to Western civilized society. We’ve had to re-learn our tribal ways, and that takes support.”
After discovering that she could run pain-free by ditching her sneakers, Gerken searched for like-minded runners. “If you run barefoot alone, people think you’re a freak, and I’d probably think that, too, if I was still in shoes,” she said. “When more than one person is running barefoot, people think you’re onto something.”
She networked on runnersworld.com, Runners World magazine’s website.
“A lot of shod runners basically attacked us, tried to demoralize us and even posted pictures of hobbit feet,” said Gerken. Her side, meanwhile, calls running footwear “boat anchors” and “coffin shoes.” From that mixed experience, the Barefoot Runners Society (barefootrunners.org) was founded in late 2009.
Runners World online executive editor Mark Remy said the topic of barefoot/minimalist running drew more than 100,000 posts on his website’s forums over the past 27 months. Some lean to the extreme.
“I’m still waiting for one to claim that [barefoot running] cures baldness,” he joked.
“Zealotry is the best word for it, and that’s not necessarily bad. ... Without sounding corny, one of the beautiful things about running is the passion we all have for it, whatever we wear on our feet. Even if we wear nothing at all.”
Remy sees the trend as a backlash to running’s popularity. People who once ran to be seen as outsiders now have to run in unusual footwear to be seen that way.
Back in Georgia, Harmon affirms that the toe shoes attract attention, but that’s not why he wears them.
“It makes a lot of sense when you think that kids run forever barefoot,” he said. “I did when I was a kid in the foothills of North Carolina, west of Charlotte. I went barefoot eight months of the year.”
Since putting on toe shoes, he has run 17 races and logged 700 miles in minimalist shoes and another 100 barefoot on a wooden boardwalk near his home. At age 55, he’s training for the traditional runner’s grail — his first marathon — made possible by kicking off traditional running shoes.
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