Many “hippies” are also interested in becoming more in touch with nature and creating a lifestyle that is more suitable to a sustainable environment.

I guess my point is that I don’t necessarily understand why you have any woes about this in the first place. Is it that you are afraid that people will associate you as a hippie?

Let me try to make this idea a little more clear. Modern running shoes have a heel lift. This means that the heel is higher than the forefoot. being barefoot you have no heel lift. Before Nike came out with the waffle racer back in the 70’s, everyone who ran did so in “flat” shoes. This meant they ran in shoes with no heel lift and basically no cushion.
Before shoes, we had sandals. The greeks set many records and are famous for distance running, as were the Incas and the modern day Tarahumara indians and the Masai warriors. These people all ran/run in sandals. Before we came up with Sandals we ran barefoot, and were good at it. There are footprints of paleolithic hunters in Australia that allow anthropologists to calculate that this person was running at about 30km/hr on soft muddy terrain…Usain Bolt runs at 37km/h with track shoes and on a track.
The idea is that wearing a running shoes is like wearing a brace. You cant feel the ground so you lose some sensations that can help with balance. You also dont exercise the foot as much as if it werent in a shoe.
When you work out other parts of your body, lets say by doing bicep curls, you dont wear wrist guards do you? No, you put some chalk on your hands and know that in addition to your arms, you are strengthening your wrists and hands.
This is analogous to going barefoot. You allow your ankles and feet to get a better workout. Stronger feet and ankles is good in that muscles surrounding a joint(there are many joints in the foot and ankle) stabilize a joint.
Another thing that separates running in normal shoes compared to barefoot is stride. Take of your shoes and run down the sidewalk. the first and most important difference is heel strike. It hurts o heel strike without cushy shoes. Running barefoot or in more minimal footwear allows you to actually sense this difference and shock, and adjust by running toe-heel-toe, instead of heel-toe. There have been studies done on shock to the joints with cusioned shoes. The study found that the more cushion, the greater the shock to the body! This happened because the body needs sensory input in order to attenuate that shock of impact. When the body doesnt feel this shock right away, it pushes down harder to try to feel the ground, causing more shock in the end. When running in minimal footwear or barefoot, you learn to “kiss” the ground. since you are landing with a much more bent knee and on the forefoot, your arch does what it was designed to do-absorb shock and spring back some energy, and your ankle and knee flex to allow the muscles to absorb impact. Hitting on your heel you land more straight legged causing the shock to be transmitted directly to the joints. There is actually more impact force landing this way regardless of how cushioned the shoe is.
You dont have to run totally barefoot, and going totally barefoot is not feasible in every situation. In a previous post we gave some examples of minimalist footwear that will allow you to get some of the benefits of going barefoot without risking stepping on something.
Running barefoot/minimally will help to improve your stride which will result in less injury if you do it properly. Many people keep their current training loads the same and just take off their shoes, this wont work. You need to very slowly work up to doing this. Imagine starting back all over from when you first started running. Go all the way back to the beginning until your calves and achilles and feet adjust to it.
If you currently dont suffer many injuries, then dont worry about it. If it aint broke, dont fix it. However, last time I checked, over 2 million years or evolutionary tweaking went into the foot. A foot that evolved to run for very long distances. A foot that had to find you dinner or you didnt survive. Somehow we have come to think in only the last 30 years that we can trump all that time and come up with the idea that we are somehow broken and need special things to fix that.
The hippie thing…i agree…it does ring of hippie, and there are those barefooters who are totally hippies. If you dont want to help yourself grow stronger because of how something looks, fine, but there are many alternatives as we listed in the post- Barefoot Shoes for the Barefoot Runner.
Does this answers your question Leo?

Blake

You want me to run. Without shoes. Outside. What’s next? Is running fully nude the real way to experience nature?

I would like to let myself get past this preconception, but this “revolution” simply screams “new wave hippie” to me.

Care to ease my woes?

The strength and determination that many runners have is inspiring to me. When I want to quit— thinking of you helps me to reach farther..

The bloggers here set goals and are forever reaching for new ones.

Keep up the fantastic writing.
Thank you so much.

Thank you for this post.