New shoes let runners bare their soles, almost

Longtime fans of running recall Ethiopia's Abebe Bikila running through the cobbled streets of Rome, barefoot, in the 1960 Olympic marathon.

As a last-minute replacement on his team, he was unable to find a pair of shoes that fit, and since he trained barefoot most of the time anyway, he decided to give it a go.

Turned out it went pretty well: Bikila won gold that day.

In the years since, distance coaches have advocated sessions of barefoot running to strengthen the feet and ankles, and to develop an efficient gait. The problem is, it's not that easy to do.

For one thing, you have to find an area that's not too hard or rough, and where you're not going to cut your feet. For another, feet that have been coddled all their lives by shoes tend to be a bit sensitive to the elements. Bare feet certainly were not made to run on concrete or asphalt.

But shoe companies, recognizing that less can be more, have begun developing shoes that offer the closest thing to barefoot running, and may deliver some of the same benefits.

Not surprisingly, Nike was the pioneer with the Nike Free, which came out five years ago. Since then, New Balance and Brooks have jumped into the barefoot-style fray, and a new Boulder, Colo.-based company called Newton has developed a shoe that encourages runners to run with a more natural and efficient technique.

While Nike originally stated up front that the Free was intended to be used only for certain training sessions and not as an "all-of-the-time" running shoe, some have found they can't go back to the seemingly clunky, feature-laden shoes that are the norm.

"I think that nature has developed a complete package — the interaction of the feet with the body, the foot with the ground — it's pretty incredible," said running shoe guru Paul Carrozza of RunTex. "The beauty of the human body is how adaptive it can be."

Carrozza notes how running midsoles evolved from EVA that was simply cut from a sheet, to compression-molded EVA that was contained by walls.

That changed the way the foot interacted with the shoe and helped develop shoes with different firmness, support, etc., but the downside is you need an exact match of running shoe type to your foot type.

Enter injection foam, which is what the barefoot-style running shoes all have, and you get the ability of the foot to self-level and create the natural shape it needs to jump with the most power.

"The Frees work beautifully. I think it's the flexibility," said Paul Seals, a longtime Austin runner and 2:45 marathoner who started wearing the Nike Free around 2005. "I had been having foot problems with the really cushioned protective shoes, but not with the Frees."

Lately, Seals has been running in the Lunar Lite, a cousin of the Free, and finds them to be super light, and yet durable. The interesting thing is, he's not a typical light-weight runner, the kind you'd expect to get away with a minimalist shoe.

"I'm 6-foot-4 and weigh 200 pounds, and I'd put these up against any other shoe in terms of wear," Seals said. "They maintain their cushioning for months. They mold to your foot, so you are running more in your natural gait. It's where your foot wants to strike as opposed to where the shoe wants to strike." -source

**
It's good that New Balance is also going towards the "almost" barefoot feel of shoes.