Barefoot Running

Courir pieds nus - site officiel

Courir pieds nus – site officiel

Barefoot running.  Why doubt thirty years of progress made with shoes designed to protect running feet? I honestly hadn’t given this any thought over the years, since I’ve rarely been hurt.  And then I swapped out my faithful New Balance 756 for some NB 758s – ouch! The first signs of Plantar Fasciitis, a pain in front of my heel, under my right foot. What?  I couldn’t even run 25K per week, without crippling myself? Darn it – not cool! So I looked up some blogs on the subject, and immediately discovered several recent articles proclaiming the advantages of running barefoot.  Their thinking can be summarized thusly:

People had been runing three million years without shoes when Nike launched the modern running shoe industry thirty years ago. The idea was to help the feet run better by enclosing and isolating them from the ground. The correlary, unfortunately, is an increase in running-related injuries. Therefore, some runners were reintroducing their feet to their natural milieu, for their own health.

Since I didn’t intend to stop running, I’ve decided to reinvent HOW I run. September 2010 I launched the first French-language blog dedicated to barefoot running, called Courir pieds nus (courirpiedsnus.com) to answer my own question: Can I run better and further if I free my feet?

Courir Pieds Nus (ou Presque)

Courir Pieds Nus (ou Presque)

Christian Harberts