Merrell Vapor Glove vs. Vivobarefoot The One..

The One on left, VG on right.

Nice review: "Barefoot Inclined: Minimalist Showdown: Merrell Vapor Glove vs. Vivobarefoot The One..."

The One looks appealing when compared side-by-side.

There's this, from another review:

"I've had no problems with this design, but the laminate strips near the big toe do wrinkle up a bit during plantar flexion (when you roll up onto your toes). A friend of mine picked up a pair and had some painful rubbing issues there as the "wrinkle" pushed down painfully on her big toe. I've had other shoes that do this at the flexpoint, and I can feel where it happens here but have no issue with it."

But I've had the same thing happen in the VG when worn sockless, so I don't know if this is the dreaded rubbing issue that plagued the early VB shoes...

And when I mentioned niche barefoot-style shoe producers, I forgot to mention VivoBarefoot. I'm wearing a pair of their loafers today. Love 'em.

Thanks to John.

"Paleo Diet Popular With Endurance Athletes"

Ah, journalists. The fact that three athletes are doing something does not make it "popular". In fact, paleo and low-carb dieting are far from popular in the athletic world, although they are on the increase. Zero is an easy place from which to increase.

Other than that, a neat article from MensJournal.com:

"What do professional cyclist Dave Zabriskie, ultramarathon runner Timothy Olson, and gold-medal triathlete Simon Whitfield have in common? All of these elite endurance athletes have pushed away the time-honored plate of pasta in favor of a "paleo" approach to nutrition. They've dialed down the carbohydrates and replaced them with copious amounts of healthy fat. And as multitudes of paleo converts claim (and anecdotal evidence suggests), this may be the key to optimizing performance and extending careers into the late thirties and beyond...."

Mark Sisson (interviewed in this article) mentioned Simon in a post a few years ago, and I completely forgot about him. Gold medal on a primal diet. Not bad. I've done a couple of posts about Tim Olson.

Zabriskie's an interesting story:

"...The results for Zabriskie were impressive, DeVore says. Over the course of their time together the 6-foot cyclist dropped his body weight from 168 pounds to 154 while improving his dead lift from 150 pounds to 245. This while increasing his power on the bike by about 15 percent."

I really do think that the only way this paleo/low-carb diet is going to make it big is if it turns out to be good for athletes. That does seem to be the case.

Barefoot Running In NYC and The State Of Barefoot Shoes

Nice!

"Chris Hawson didn't run much in New York City until he took off his shoes. That was three years, and more than 9,000 miles, ago.

"You can blame Chris McDougall and Born to Run for that,” he says while sipping hot chocolate in a coffee shop near the Union Square Paragon Sports where he works as an outerwear buyer. “It was inspirational to me. I didn't treat it as a technique manual, but it set me off on a path.”

"A health scare in 2009 prompted Hawson, now in his mid-50s, to start running a couple of times a week, but he found his IT bands, knees, and shins started to hurt, forcing him to resort to inline skating. Then Hawson, who spent a decade leading bike and ski trips in Northern Scotland, discovered Vibram FiveFingers and ran a few hundred miles during the summer and fall, mixing them in with a couple other pairs of more traditional shoes. But winter came, so he packed the FiveFingers away because of the cold. That plan didn't last long, however, and pretty soon he had ditched conventional shoes entirely."

Read the whole thing.

I went to see In the High Country (a movie about ultra-runner Anton Krupicka) in NYC last night, and Chris was there. (Paragon organized the showing.)

Chris, as the Outdoor story makes clear, is the real deal. I've run with him a couple of time in various McDougall-organized "events". He really does do the bulk of his miles barefoot.

As a buyer at Paragon he had some interesting thoughts on the minimalist shoe market: it's fading. In large part because the minimalist shoes last so long. With no foam to break down, you replace your shoes when they tear, or when the sole wears through. Chis explained that he just tossed a pair of Altras that had 2,500 miles on them, because the sole wore through and he had torn the upper on a rock.

Given that the typical running shoe companies recommend that you replace their products every 300 miles, that's a major difference. He then mentioned that he probably had bought enough pairs of minimalist shoes to last the rest of his life, at that rate. I also have enough to last quite a long time.

Altra Torrin: not minimalist.

He explained that there are no new minimalist shoe designs coming out: even Altra's new line has a lot of cushion built in. We both wondered about the future of Merrell's Vapor Glove, one of my personal favorites. It was nice to see them in Merrell's winter catalog, but I wonder if they'll last through next summer. New Balance's Mimimus line does doesn't seem to be doing well (according to a New Balance store I visited recently), as the most minimal models are falling by the wayside.

Guess it's not too surprising... When Dr. Munson first invented the barefoot-style shoe after World War I, they put millions of them on the feet of American soldiers. They were very popular, but then the whole thing disappeared as generations turned over, and they were forgotten...

Hopefully a few companies will stick with the idea so folks like me and Chris can replace our shoes when we need to.

Luna, Russell, and Skora seem to be pretty committed to the minimalist idea. [P.S. And VivoBarefoot!]

But there's more research coming along showing the clear advantages of barefoot over shod foot-binding, so hopefully the idea will stick around.

After 10 miles running in the snow.

My running rotation has been barefoot, Luna Sandals, Vapor Gloves, and Vibram Fivefinger Speeds. None of them show much wear on the sole. If I do a trail race, I'll wear the Trail Glove, and I wore the Sonic Glove the other day when I did a 10-mile run in the snow. I can't really see any reason why I'd ever want to go back to the sort of sneaker I used to wear.

(Found the Outdoor story via Chris McDougall on Twitter.)

Barefoot 'Granny' Wins 3k Race In India

BBC News:

"Lata Bhagwan Kare [age 61] performed the feat wearing a nauvari - a traditional sari named after the term for a single nine-yard (8.2m) piece of cloth - Indian newspaper Daily News & Analysis reports. She started the race in the western town of Baramati wearing slippers. When one came off, she discarded the other too. Within minutes, she had apparently left all the other runners way behind.

"I used to go for morning walks daily, but I had never run. If I had even tried to run, people would have found it strange and they would have asked me uncomfortable questions," Kare says. She tells the paper she felt "a little awkward" at the starting line as the other participants were staring at her outfit. "However, when the race began and I started overtaking them one by one, I gained my energy." Throughout the... race, she kept telling herself she wanted to win - "And I did it." She says she'd like to take part in more races, but "only god knows whether I remain as strong then as I am today"."

This seems to be the original story, with the picture above.

No word on her finishing time.

P.S. File this one under "Too good to be true", or maybe "why journalists aren't to be trusted"...

The first commenter on this post provides a link to a more likely version of the story: that the lady in question won a 3k race held at a marathon, not the marathon itself. I looked around before posting this suspecting something like that was the case, but wasn't able to find any thing. So thanks to La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie) for setting me straight.

"61-year-old barefoot woman labourer wins 3-km race at Baramati marathon"

This story provides the most likely version of events, and the title ("Sixty-six-year-old granny runs 'marathon' in a saree in Maharashtra", with marathon in scare quotes) explains how the story changed from the facts:

"Kare's dress code was a traditional Maharashtrian saree, and no shoes at all! She won the senior citizen's category running 3 km and was awarded a cash prize of Rs 5000 and a certificate.

"Over 9500 people participated in the race in four categories but clearly the highlight was the 66-year-old farm worker. After running her first marathon Kare, who is a grandmother, now wants to run more races. With better footwear and running gear, you never know, she could just be another Fauja Singh in the making...."

"Better footwear". Dumb journalists...

So she won the senior category in a 3k race. At 66! Congratulations, nevertheless.

And a good lesson on how the press can twist a story, and how failing to check news reports adequately can lead to error...

Low-Carb Athletes: World-Record Ultra-Runner Zach Bitter

Hold your hats: World Record: ran 101.66 miles in 12 hours; American record: 100 miles in 11:47:13. The world record he broke was Greek God (that's not ironic, it's literal) Yiannis Kourus's* record.
That's a 7:04 pace (minutes per mile), for more than 100 miles. Wow.

And, just to make it extra cool, he did it wearing minimalist shoes and eating a low-carb paleoish diet.

He has a recent post on his blog describing his diet:

This post has moved to Substack.

"The Nervous System and Metabolic Dysregulation: Emerging Evidence Converges on Ketogenic Diet Therapy"

Fascinating.

"The KD might offer fewer chronic negative side effects than medication, and given that it has been in use for over 90 years, serious or systematic negative consequences would likely have surfaced by now."

Indeed. They make a strong case in this paper that epilepsy is effectively glucose poisoning...

"Converging lines of evidence suggest the utility of a KD for pain relief. First, it has long been known that reducing glucose metabolism influences pain. There is an overall increase in pain thresholds (and thus reduced pain) when glycolytic enzymes are inhibited..."

"...Thus, we predicted that the KD, which reduces glucose metabolism and is anticonvulsant, would reduce pain."

I've certainly noticed this effect since adopting a very-low-carb diet. I have a scar on my arm now from falling down steps. I didn't even notice the injury to my arm until I was in the shower many hours later. It's been a consistent reduction in pain from injury... And I get injured pretty frequently with the sports I do. ;)

"A better understanding of the relationship between metabolism and pain could help multiple and comorbid conditions, and the KD might prove uniquely useful against diabetes and diabetes-related neuropathy. Although work with rodents has produced mixed results (Al-Khalifa et al., 2009, 2011; Garbow et al., 2011; Park et al., 2011; Poplawski et al., 2011), clinical studies have found exclusively positive outcomes: after KD treatment, patients with type I or II diabetes had improved control of blood glucose, and many could have their medications reduced or eliminated (Gumbiner et al., 1996; Yancy et al., 2005; Westman et al., 2008; Dressler et al., 2010). In addition, type I diabetic patients (and, based on one report, children with epilepsy) prefer foods that are high in fat and low in carbohydrates (Amari et al., 2007; Snell-Bergeon et al., 2009), which might be attempted self-medication."

Only a doctor is dumb enough to prescribe more poison to a patient suffering from glucose poisoning...

Although polyunsaturated fatty acid content of the KD seems not to be important in the diet’s anticonvulsant effect (Dell et al., 2001; Dahlin et al., 2007), it might be a crucial characteristic for KD influence on inflammation.

It might seem ironic that the KD is discussed here as reducing inflammation, given that other high-fat diets and obesity are definitely linked to chronic inflammation (Thaler and Schwartz, 2010; Ding and Lund, 2011; Laugerette et al., 2011). Those high-fat diets that lead to obesity, including the so-called Western diet, include a high amount of fat along with normal amounts of carbohydrate, a crucial difference from the very low-carbohydrate KD which typically leads to weight loss (Gumbiner et al., 1996; Halyburton et al., 2007; Tendler et al., 2007; Westman et al., 2008). Thus, the high-fat-plus-carbohydrate diet promotes fat storage whereas the high fat, low-carbohydrate diet promotes fat metabolism.

This is fascinating. Not sure what they mean in the first paragraph. My bet would be that increased omega-6 polyunsaturated fat increases inflammation, even on a ketogenic diet, and is responsible in large part for the negative effects on obesity of the "Western diet".

A key part of my personal diet is avoiding omega-6 fats. The diet used to induce metabolic disruption in lab animals contains a large portion of omega-6 fat.

More On Resveratrol

"Resveratrol in mammals: effects on aging biomarkers, age-related diseases, and life span."

"Nevertheless, no study has demonstrated the prolongation of life span in healthy nonobese mammal models."

And none ever will.

"In our opinion, more studies should be performed..."

And you should pay us to do them!

Thanks to Bill Lagakos on Twitter for the link.

"What a Natural Human Foot Looks Like If You Never Wear Shoes"

Go look!  Very cool.