Running Barefoot -- No, Really...

By John Ballard

I'm occasionally grateful for getting older, achieving an age when I am no longer expected to jump at every new fashion. More at the link, perhaps more than you ever thought about.

While there�s a small and growing sub-culture of barefoot runners these days, there�s also the view that this is a sure track to contracting Hepatitis C. This is because enough people have it, and enough of them are urinating out and about the city, so it is only a matter of time and chance for the moment when you have a cut on the palm of your foot, which becomes infected. But even in rural and remote regions of the world, walking or running barefoot can be a high-risk activity, exposing the body to hookworm, podoconiosis, and other neglected tropical diseases. Seen from this perspective, the shoe is a prophylactic, protecting the body from the diseases that may be locked into the loam of the earth. The goal of further design and innovation in shoes, therefore, should be to afford the flexibility and sensation of going bareback, while still ensuring that users enjoy safe sports.

The success of the global culture industry rests on its ability, every so often, to spin out a new kind of consumer product or service that can offer up rich desirable experiences that could not have even been imagined just a few years earlier. I�m thinking of Levi�s, Nikes, the Walkman, the Spielberg blockbuster, iStuff, Social Networking. These foot-gloves approach these heights of socio-technical and cultural innovation, for they embody a new way of living in the very form of their product offering. No other company offers what they offer at this time, their brand is coterminous with the category they have created: five-fingered footwear. The foot-gloves are made by an Italian rubber soles manufacturer called Vibram, which has enjoyed long-standing repute among the hiking and mountaineering community. With the development of their uniquely designed sock-shoe-sandals, however, they are now funding biomechanical and sports-medical research, which in turn fuels fevered popular reception, discussion and commentary on how best to walk and run as a contemporary human. Vibram S.P.A. [DON'T skip the intro] is understandably reluctant to make specific claims about the advantages of its footwear over conventional sports shoes, but the popular receptions of the product have discussed the natural splay of human toes across the ground while running. Five-finger footwear is perceived as being able to better approximate the putative bio-mechanical and evolutionary values of that splay, as the foot slaps the ground and spring up again.