Running for Your Life: What About Those Five-Finger Shoes?

You don’t see them very often. Which is a big surprise to me. A year or so ago I was really beginning to think they would catch on – at least in my neighborhood of Park Slope, the Berkeley of Brooklyn.

There is the ugly-fashion factor. Hardly a deterrent for me, who will wear the same sweat-stained ball cap to social events just short of meeting friends for drinks at Terroir, the Brooklyn offshoot of the upscale TriBeCa winebar that has opened at the end of our street. But in New York City, you’ll find folks are, as the popular billboard says: “Tolerant of Your Beliefs, Judgmental of Your Shoes.”

Here, TOYBJOYS is a more powerful axiom than “Walk Inside Cushions and Don’t Exercise Your Feet.” That’s the message from the mega-seller “Born to Run” by Chris McDougall, which has single-handedly reshaped thinking about whether the human body is actually born to run and that in the past millennium we here in Western civilization have been mucking things up by not running – and not in bare feet, no less.

I don’t do it and have never done it. Run in these five-finger shoes, that is, which is as close to barefoot running as you can get. It could be that, in my late fifties, I feel that a significant change like this could only throw me off, as in introduce stresses that could lead to a lifestyle-ending injury. (I run with athletic orthotics and compression hosiery to keep neuritis and shin splints, respectively, at bay.) The LEI is not something I care to risk. Maybe, in the spring, I’ll get a pair of five-finger shoes for walking around and take it from there, because I do believe in the advantages that come from treating your feet to a workout in the same way that I have fallen in the habit of doing for my other bone and muscle groups.

If I were a runner in my twenties or thirties, though, I’d like to think I'd be out there in those five-finger shoes. They are especially advisable for those whose pace results in a neutral foot strike. As McDougall writes in “Born to Run,” bare feet will support you in a way that will promote whole body health like nothing else.

And when it comes to the rubberneckers, who believe me will hear you coming before they see you, think again. Let them TOYBJOYS. You’re on a run, not on the red carpet. And in your ripe old age you’ll be able to wear whatever shoes you want (that, odds are, won’t be propped up on wheelchair foot rests) !

Next: Running for Your Life: Secession vs. Bipartisanism vs. Me-ism