"Barefoot" Running

I've hardly been blogging for a period of time, partly because of my reservist and partly because i decided to spend my free time running rather than gaining weight LOL. With the view that Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2009 is coming up, i decided to talk about running in this post.

Having seen the title to this post, you should have already guessed that i'll be talking about "barefoot" running. Basically the idea is that researchers have discovered that people in more developed country seem to suffer more from running related injuries as compared to citizens of less well off countries. There are in fact published researches that show runners wearing "better" pairs of running shoes to suffer more from injuries associated to running compared to runners who are wearing poorly cushioned and supported shoes.

Picture taken from http://www.barefootrunner.com/barefoot-101/

The image above explains the reason behind it pretty well. Our feet have evolved to the present form for a reason. By introducing cushioned shoes to our feet, we're changing the way we run. Without padded heels support from shoes, no one in the right frame of mind would have tried to run by landing on their heels (what everyone's doing now with shoes). This action will result in a very sore heel that will inevitably lead to the runner trying other method of landing their feet. They will finally settled down to landing on their forefoot, which is "designed" to flex and cushions such impact. This change in landing method will prevent the locking of your knees and back while you run, the impact thus doesn't get transferred to them. In fact we tend to land way heavier when we are wearing shoes as we can't feel the pain and the ground with the thick cushion in between. The pain from the heel in this case is a signal to tell you that you are running the wrong way!

Running shoes are also design to prevents your feet from working too much. In the long run, your feet start losing their ability to work to their best of ability without the shoes. With less than fully developed feet, we will start getting too dependent on shoes. We then get injured easily in the absence of them.

Thus recently, I've been running with Nike Cortez Flywire shoes below.

You can see the slits on the soles that allows it to flex. To be frank, i'm not even sure if they are designed to be ran in. The arch support is almost non-existence, but as I've always been a forefoot runner, I've not have much problem running in these (My friends have always commented that i look more like bouncing than running as a result of my running style). I've since progress from running in them from 5km to about 12km per run to date and so far everything pretty ok. The only problem is that it feels too flimsy to sprint while wearing them. Thus i will wear another pair of shoes if i know i'm gonna do circuit training.

From a design viewpoint, I've always struggle between creating a product that helps and improves people's life or should we design to really benefit users without making them suffer in the long run. As a result of technologies, we become over reliant on technologies such as handphone and personal computers. I'm sure most of us can remember that we used to be able to recall telephone numbers of all our friends by heart, now how many can still claim to do that? Thus i'm a strong believer of "too much help is no help" and hopefully there are many more designers out there who share my view on this. This case also shows that conventional wisdom may not be always correct, by understanding deeper issues and how things works, we tend to get really useful insights.