A while ago while listening to one of my many favorite podcasts on wellness or ancestral health, I encountered a reference to another podcast’s episode entitled “The Barefoot Podiatrist with Dr. Ray McClanahan.”

The concepts I learned in this episode were a gamechanger for me. It seems that modern footwear, with its thick, cushioned sole, raised heel, and narrow toe box, acts like a kind of cast for the foot. If you have ever worn a cast yourself, or know anyone who has, you may recall how after several weeks of wearing a cast, the underlying muscles atrophied and lost a significant amount of strength. And this is only after a few weeks. Imagine if you wore that cast for several hour every day! This is basically what is happening when we wear shoes. The muscles in our feet lose their strength and integrity leading to fallen arches and chronic pain. The combination of raised heels and narrow toe boxes causes pressure on the toes and metatarsal joints leading to bunions and hammer toes among other things. Our feet need to feel the ground to know how much force to exert with each footfall. The thick sole on most athletic shoes leads the wearer to apply excessive force so that the foot may feel the ground through all the cushioning. Usually the most cushion is in the heel, which promotes a heel-strike running style that puts enormous stress on the joints of the legs and back leading to arthritis and other overuse injuries.


At this point you may be saying to yourself, “Self, I sure as heck don’t want any of those things! what can a self do?” In the game of shoes it may be that the only winning move is not to play. Enter the minimalist shoe movement.
It makes sense to me that as long as there have been shoes, there have been humans who have resisted wearing them. I recall several times in the late 90s witnessing a female classmate walking around our college campus barefoot. I remember having a sort of icky reaction. I was definitely drinking the “all humans must wear shoes” Kool-Aid. I wish now that rather than aversion I had felt curiosity. Perhaps then I would have approached her and asked her, “excuse me, miss, I’m just curious…why do you walk barefoot?” Perhaps then she might have told me all about the benefits of barefoot walking that I know today and saved me many years of hardship.


My next step down the minimalist shoe/barefoot rabbit hole involved reading a book called, “Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen” by Christopher McDougall. In this book I learned about the amazing feats of the Tarahumara tribespeople who regularly ran great distances over rocky, hilly terrain wearing nothing more (on their feet at least) than thin-soled, huarachi style sandals. As an ancestral health obsessed minimalist, the idea of these sandals immediately appealed to me. I had to get some. A quick DuckDuckGo search took me to the Earthrunners store & blog. In their Northern California based shop, Earthrunners hand makes minimalist sandals modeled after the Tarahumara’s own style of sandals. I bought a pair about a year ago and these sandals have been pretty much the only thing I wear on my feet when I am wearing anything on my feet. I wear them at home, at work, out about town, hiking, exploring, and sometimes even running. They do take some getting used to. You have to ease into using them. But after several month of wearing them, I can definitely tell my feet feel stronger. I enjoy being able to feel the texture of the ground under my feet while not worrying about cuts and splinters.

Why do you wear shoes? Is it for performance? fashion? just because?


What are you willing to relinquish in the pursuit of strong feet and a fit body?