The Barefoot Edition

On proprioception and running.

Emanuel Derman (ED) is a friend of WITI and the author of My Life as a Quant. He also has a new memoir, Brief Hours and Weeks: My Life as a Capetonian. If you enjoyed this, be sure to read his classic Being Foreign edition for WITI.

Emanuel here. Through years of running I’ve worn many different kinds of running shoes. I began with ‘tackies,’ what we called canvas tennis shoes in South Africa. No one knew of anything better then. When I was living in the U.S. in 1970, the Adidas Country arrived, white leather with green stripes. I bought two in case it went out of production, and painstakingly removed the stripes with a special unpicker, because I tried to be a no-logo guy. In 1974, I moved to the first Nike waffle sole.

Ignorant of stretching or training, I used to go out and run exactly a mile as fast as I could. I regularly got shin splints after a few days or a week, and then stopped running until they went away, and then started again, and then stopped again when they came back.

Then, one spring day in England in the late 70s, I found a bunch of cricket fields all adjacent to each other in the Oxford Parks. They provided an all-grass extended running surface. I took off my shoes and ran and discovered that I didn’t get hurt. Since then, I’ve always taken the opportunity to run barefoot. On grass, when I was in places with large well-tended grass fields (you don’t want to step on broken bottles or nails), and mostly on the beach, near the water at low tide when the wet sand is flat and firm and perfect for long distance running. On the beach is best.

Why is this interesting?

My theory is that when you run barefoot and feel the grass or sand on the soles of your feet, the texture gives you feedback that makes you step more naturally and lightly. You don’t just clunk down. Furthermore, barefoot you can flex your toes, which God gave you to help with balance and propulsion. When you wear shoes that protect you from impact, you lose the natural motion.

This feedback between the ground, your feet, and your stride is an example of proprioception, the body’s ability to sense its own position and movements without visual feedback. It’s what lets you balance on one leg with your eyes closed (v. difficult, be careful) or lets you scratch an itch on your face without using a mirror to get your finger to the right place. When you wear rigid or padded shoes you lose some of that feedback. The more padding, the more protection, but the less proprioception.

When I can’t run without shoes, which is mostly, I try to get running shoes that have zero lift (no elevated heel) and restrict your foot as little as possible. The downside is less protection from impact, but to me it’s worth it.

Along these lines, I once saw an ad for a toothbrush that consisted of a flexible silicon thimble with bristles around the end part. You put it on your index finger and brushed your teeth with it. The notion was that you would have feedback between your mouth and your finger when you brushed, and do it more thoroughly and subtly than with a rigid toothbrush that wasn’t a part of your body. I almost bought it.

What made me think of all this now? There is nowhere in Manhattan you can run without shoes. Various companies sell uncomfortable weird glove-shoes with pockets for each toe that are meant to allow you to run on roads¹. But often when I’ve walked in Central Park, I’ve thought about how one might train barefoot on Sheep Meadow. The other sunny day, walking past Sheep Meadow filled with people lazing about on the grass, I saw a little girl of about nine in a yellow dress jogging steadily without shoes around the inside perimeter of the meadow. I don’t have a photo – took out my phone too late – but I took a brief whack at ChatGPT to create the general effect. (ED)

1. The great Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila won the 1960 Rome Olympic marathon running without shoes. He won again in the 1964 Olympics, but that time he wore Puma running shoes.