"How fast can we run?"

"Marathon-ready Daniel Lieberman offers evolutionary perspective on Bannister 4-minute mile, human speed limits, and ‘Man Against Horse’".

"...He did talk about the kinds of shoes that he wore back in the day, and was fascinated by — and not particularly approving of — how running shoes had gotten so built up. He, like any fast miler, was a forefoot striker. We published a few years later the paper in which we made the argument that, essentially, prior to shoes pretty much everybody ran the way Bannister ran. He felt that was clearly the best way to run.

"I remember him describing how he had his shoes made by a cobbler in London. You couldn’t go to a shoe store back then and buy a pair of running shoes. He basically had to have his shoes custom made. I remember he discussed how hard it was to get the right kind of material — light but durable enough not to fall apart...."

Read the whole thing!

"How a decade-old sports science article changed my relationship with running for the better"

In the span of a few pages, anthropologist Daniel Lieberman and biologist Dennis Bramble explained how human physiology is better suited for distance running than almost any other animal’s. And what’s more is that running was critical in allowing our ancient ancestors to out-compete other predators for prey. Running wasn’t an invention of modern fitness culture, it was as natural and uniquely human as the capacity for abstract thought.

I had a similar reaction to learning about Lieberman and Bramble's research, although my exposure was through Born to Run, which is a fantastic read on its own.

Prof. Lieberman is one of the most learned individuals I've ever had the pleasure to encounter. If you'd like to learn more about his research and thinking, I highly recommend his The Story of the Human Body.
 

Interesting Boston Race Results

Didn't watch the race, so I have no idea how the elites did, but I just came across this article with some notable finishers:

Amby Burfoot, 69, 4:17:48, 1968 Boston Marathon winner and Runner’s World writer at large. 

Scott Jurek, 42, 4:09:27, ultrarunner who set the Appalachian Trail thru-hike speed record last year. 

Daniel Lieberman, 51, 3:34:21, paleoanthropologist at Harvard University whose work helped inspire the barefoot running movement.

Yep, Dan Lieberman beat Scott Jurek, 9 years his junior, in a race.  And you thought he was just smart.

I don't know what he was wearing on his feet!

P.S. See the comments below, Jurek decided at the last minute to run—how does that work, anyway?  I thought Boston was hard to get into!—so it's probably not fair to point out the Lieberman beat him.

However, Arnulfo Quimare, who beat Jurek in the race that was the climax of Born to Run, also ran Boston this year.  Lieberman beat him, too.

Arnulfo Quimare, 33, 3:38:11, the Tarahumara runner who defeated Scott Jurek in the 2006 race that was featured in the book Born to Run. 

Native American Running Events at the Boston Marathon

From Dan Lieberman, this morning.  Please spread the word!

Native American Running: Culture, Health, Sport

Harvard University and the Boston Athletic Association are pleased to co-sponsor Native American Running: Culture, Health, Sport on April 15 and 16.  Coinciding with both the 2016 Boston Marathon and with the 80th anniversary of Ellison Myers “Tarzan” Brown, Sr. (Narragansett) winning the Marathon in 1936, this multi-day event will explore the history and importance of Native American running traditions, present efforts to support and encourage running in Native American communities today, and promote the many benefits of running.

The multi-day event kicks off with a conference on Friday, April 15 1:30 – 5:00 at Harvard's Science Center (Room C) featuring talks by native American runners including Olympian Billy Mills (Oglala Lakota), Oren Lyons (Haudenosaunee), Arnulfo Quimare (Tarahumara), Irma Chavez (Tarahumara), Dustin Martin (Navajo), Chris Sockalexis (Penobscot), Mathew Gilbert (Hopi), Alyssa Mt. Pleasant (Tuscorara), Tleena Ives (Port Gamble S’Klallam) and others.  There will also be talks by David Carrasco, Daniel Lieberman, Chris McDougall, and more.

The conference is free, and no registration is required. See the full schedule at https://www.peabody.harvard.edu/native-american-running.

On Saturday April 16 at the Boston Marathon Expo (Hynes Convention Center), Billy Mills will speak at 11:00, and there will be a panel discussion from 12-1:00 featuring Rob De Castella, Irma Chavez, Dan Lieberman, Dustin Martin, Chris McDougall, Arnuflo Quimare and more.
This event is also free and open to the public

If you've never been to an event with Dan Lieberman and Chris McDougall, make it a priority.  They're both very knowledgeable (although Prof. Lieberman takes the cake!), and very entertaining speakers.  Most highly recommended.

Daniel Lieberman: Humans Evolved Big, Costly Brains

How and why the human brain evolved is the key question in human evolution, and a fascinating topic for folks interested in the topics this blog covers.

"Why Aren't Shoes Preventing Running Injuries?"

Good question.

"Barefoot running shoes and shoes with extra cushioning seek to protect runners—but despite all the new technology, running injuries are no less common than they were 30 years ago."

Most runners are still running in the same sort of shoes that they've been wearing for the last 30 years. It shouldn't be surprising that we're seeing the same outcome, if we assume that running shoes can affect injury rates.

"In the past 30 years running has changed from something done by trained runners who competed for sport, to an activity that is enjoyed by the masses."

This is silly. I'm pretty sure that "the masses" have been running for a long, long time. As this account makes clear, foot racing has long been a regular part of recreation:

"The Clary Grove boys, the Island Grove boys, the Sangamon River boys and the Sand Ridge boys, each designated by the part of the country from which they came, would gather there to indulge in horse racing, foot racing, wrestling, jumping, ball playing and shooting at a mark."

So it's a typically weak article on the topic, but he at least gets points for quoting Jay Dicharry and Dan Lieberman, and mentioning Born to Run.

"Confronted with the baffling array of running shoes, the prevailing wisdom seems to be to pick a shoe that fits your running style, not to hope a shoe will change you."

Of course the high-heeled cushioned sneakers that most all wear today were created to do exactly that:

"...Over the next 40 years, we have seen the height as well as the cushion gradually increase. These developments inadvertently made runners adopt a “heel to toe” gait or “heel strike” when running. Bowerman and W.E. Harris authored a primer entitled Jogging: A [Medically Approved] Physical Fitness Program for All Ages in 1967. In this very popular book, they noted the most efficient way to run should be landing or striking on the heel first. The authors specifically stated that forefoot striking is incorrect and not the proper way to land.

"Bowerman and Harris had no scientific basis for this explanation. Several years later, they went on to create a running shoe that contained a cushioned heel...."

That shoe was Nike.

Interviews With Daniel Lieberman And Reviews Of His "The Story Of The Human Body"

Newest first:

Minds and Brains: Book Review: Daniel Lieberman’s The Story of the Human Body.

Lieberman argues that all of these diseases are in some sense a result of cultural evolution speeding ahead of natural evolution with the result that have humans manufactured a psychologically comfy and satisfying environment that is paradoxically unhealthy without fundamentally affecting our reproductive fitness. Lieberman calls this this paradoxical unhealthiness “dysevolution”.

The Colbert Show: Daniel Lieberman. Interview starts at about minute 14.

PaleoRunner: "The Story of the Human Body: Daniel Lieberman" (embedded below):



Food Navigator (this site is so annoying that I caution against clicking on the link, but include for completeness): "Type 2 diabetes a ‘mismatch disease’ for our Paleolithic bodies"

The Guardian: "The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease by Daniel Lieberman – Review"

National Public Radio: "How Our Stone Age Bodies Struggle To Stay Healthy In Modern Times"

Mail Tribune: "The Human Body Wasn't Built For Modern Life"

Boston Globe: "‘Human Body’ author talks ‘mismatch diseases’"

Everyday eBook: "The Story of the Human Body: Straight Answers to Big Questions"

Outside Online: "The Human Body has a Story to Tell"

Far North Endurance: "A review of The Story of the Human Body, by Daniel Lieberman"

Harvard Magazine: "Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman discusses health and human evolution"

"What We Can Learn About Running From Barefoot Running"

Prof. Daniel Lieberman at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA:



P.S. If you ever have the opportunity to hear Prof. Lieberman speak, take it. I posted this before listening, and I am in the middle of listening to it now. This is a terrific discussion about the evidence for barefoot running, and what the actual benefits may be. The audience is a bunch of doctors, so he's being quite specific and careful in his argument; it's fascinating.

How Google Reader Saved My Life

Google Reader is shutting down.

Hey Google, We Still Love Reader

I'm in shock.

This blog is about barefoot running and healthy, paleo-style diets.  These two topics have utterly changed my and my family's life in the past five years.

Post moved to Substack

"Harvard Prof. Dan Lieberman Running Strong–With Shorter Stride"

Amby Burfoot interviews him.

Thoughts on the Ancestral Health Symposium 2012

Last year I missed the opportunity to attend the first AHS, in Los Angeles. I have a certain visceral opposition to LA, for no good reason (I once spent a night there when I missed a connecting flight, and that's my entire exposure to the place). I spent the rest of the year regretting that, especially after hearing what a great event it was.

AHS 2012

So this year I rectified my error, made easier by the fact that they held it at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, 140 miles from my house.

I was a little apprehensive heading up there as I was unsure how valuable this event would turn out to be, as I do spend a fair bit of time reading about all this stuff. What would I learn? Where would I eat dinner? All sorts of concerns...

All of which were totally unfounded. What a terrific event, what a terrific bunch of people. The event reminded me very much of the early meetings of the World Wide Web Artists' Consortium in 1994 and '95 in New York. The WWWAC helped to creat the Internet that we all take for granted today, as it was the focus of early web development in NYC. Just like then, at AHS you got the feeling that you were in on a Great Truth, and that all that remained was to let the world in on it, and thereby change everything. I don't doubt for a minute that AHS will help this to happen, just as the WWWAC did. It's a great feeling to be at the early stage of a revolution like this.

The symposium was organized into sessions, held in what seemed to be rapid-fire order. The first day only contained one track, but the second and third had dual tracks, which got annoying when you wanted to attend two simultaneously, or even worse, when you started chatting with someone and then realized you'd missed the first 10 minutes of your next session.

Dan Lieberman of Harvard was the keynote speaker, opening the symposium with a terrifically funny (as usual: he's wasted on Harvard, he should do stand-up comedy) overview of human evolution and evolutionary adaptation, setting the stage for all the sessions to follow. I understand the sessions are all to be posted on the 'net, I highly recommend watching them: access will be free. Some of them were breathtaking, some left me with tears in my eyes, like Joel Salatin's ringing cry to take back our freedom to feed ourselves, and Terry Wahls' account of her recovery from multiple sclerosis. A few annoyed me, like Dr. James O'Keefe's misconceived but well-meaning account of the cardiovascular dangers of marathon running, but all that I attended were very informative and led by intelligent and well-spoken presenters.

When Robb Wolf describes John Welbourn as large, he's wrong. The dude's enormous, and he gave a fascinating discussion of how some athletes he's working with have become world record holders while eating a low-carb paleo diet. Carbohydrates appear to be seriously over-rated...

Joel Salatin closed the first day. What a speaker! It felt like a revival meeting, and he was the preacher of real food and the good life. He also explained how much more productive his holistic approach to farming is, and touched on how impossible it is to do with government meddling. He got a resounding standing ovation.

Prof. Lieberman led a barefoot run along the Charles River the morning of the second day, which offered a rare opportunity to have a guided tour through Cambridge by a leading scientist. Lieberman's a fast runner! The easy, conversational portion of the run was at a quick pace, and at the end he announced that we were going to to "strides", "at the end, when they have the most benefit!" I kept up for a bit, but my poor aerobic fitness allowed the professor to leave me in the dust. Happily Ben Greenfield, a Maffetone disciple and triathlete, completely understood, and promised he'd never tell Phil that I exceeded my MAF HR. (I had to stop at the beginning of the run and turn off the audible alert on the Garmin.) Too funny.

The only negative thing about barefoot running is that the range of adaptation is narrow: the fact that I can run 6 miles around my roads didn't mean that I could run 6 miles on the rougher roads and paved trails of Cambridge, and my feet were tingling for the next two days.

Professor Lieberman was kind enough to offer me a tour of the Mecca of barefoot-running science: his lab at Harvard. I got to see the famous treadmill, some of his new gadgets for measuring runners, and an interesting explanation of how difficult it is to measure many of the things that may lead to running injury. Mathematical correction of jiggling is a major undertaking, it turns out. We also went looking for Eskimo teeth, but only found a few cavemen.

A few scientists and doctors recounted their research testing ketogenic diets on cancer progression (very promising) and epilepsy (the best treatment approach by far). Nevertheless, institutions are very reluctant to fund or even allow these studies; insurance companies are reluctant to pay for them, despite being more effective and less expensive; and one doctor described the need to refer to these diets as "therapies" to get them through the morass of bureaucracy...

Outside the sessions...

P.S.

Oh, and God, I got to meet Stephan Guyenet and thank him for probably saving my life. I wouldn't be typing this, or enjoying a symptom-free existance right now, if it wasn't for his incredibly level-headed and well-reasoned blog, and for all the hard work he's done. Thanks again, Stephan. I had the additional pleasure of standing around with drinks in our hands talking with him and Prof. Lieberman about teeth. Moments like that made this whole thing worthwhile. And I'm really looking forward to what he produces in his professional career.

End P.S.

I met too many other people to recount here, but have a few thoughts in general. It was an incredibly healthy-looking crowd. But the game I played was to ask the people I met how they'd gotten into the paleo/ancestral health scene. Most recounted some story of health issues that the medical establishment had been unable to resolve, which abated once a healthy diet (meaning one in opposition to the government regulations) had been adopted. Terry Wahls is the most extreme, but many of the rest of us had similar experiences. Considering how many of these people have intractable, incurable conditions of one sort or another, they're looking terrific and acting like they're the happiest people on the planet. Oh, and a couple of years after getting out of her wheelchair poor Dr. Wahls showed up to AHS with her arm in a sling. She broke it falling off her bicycle.

I've also never seen so many people with minimalist, or no, shoes on. Lunas were a popular option (Prof. Lieberman and John Durant wore them for part of our run, as did I, Ben ran the whole thing in his bare feet.), Vibrams, VivoBarefoot, New Balance Minimi (suitable, since their HQ is in Boston), Skora, Merrel and again, too many others to recount, including some I didn't recognize. It's hard to believe that two years ago it was hard to find a minimalist option. Now I couldn't keep track of them all. Happily, there were many doctors in attendence. While one cardiologist did explain the many difficulties in changing the "standard of care" in our bureaucratic, sclerotic medical system, one hopes that a grass root effort like this one can upend the medical establishment's understanding of the relationship between diet and chronic illness, and offer help to the many people who are ill-served by the current regime.

Tower of low-carb power

Of course the closing ceremony was the Barefoot Banquet, held at the Charles Hotel just down the street from the law school. As with all the rest of the sessions, all the food was paleo, so folks like Dr. Wahls and me could eat without concern, and enjoy the famed NorCal Margarita. Some of us seemed to enjoy them a bit too much. ;) The funniest moment of the evening was when they brought out the grass-fed, gluten-free sliders. So many buns were left over that some enterprising folk built a fort out of them. What a terrific time.

And then, to top it off, I gave John Durant a ride back toward NYC to save him from a long bus ride, and got to hear all about the book he's working on. It sounds terrific, I'm quite excited to read the whole thing.

I think this alliance of scientists, doctors, patients, and athletes have a real chance to change the world. What exciting times.

And a side note: the conference was organized by volunteers. I've been to expensive, professional conferences that weren't this well organized, and certainly not this cheerful or thoughtful. Bravo to all involved.

P.S. Here's a roundup of recaps of AHS12 if you're interested.

Lieberman: "Foot Strike and Injury Rates in Endurance Runners"

It's finally out. (I used to wait for books and movies, now I wait for scientific studies on running form.  I think I've gone off the deep end of nerd-dom.)

"Conclusions: Competitive cross country runners on a college team incur high injury rates, but runners who habitually rearfoot strike have significantly higher rates of repetitive stress injury than those who mostly forefoot strike. This study does not test the causal bases for this general difference. One hypothesis, which requires further research, is that the absence of a marked impact peak in the ground reaction force during a forefoot strike compared to a rearfoot strike may contribute to lower rates of injuries in habitual forefoot strikers."

Professor Lieberman is careful with his language, as always.  But I'm going to continue fore-foot striking when running, because it's sure been safer in my experience...

Thanks to Sweat Science, who's got more in his post.

Daniel Lieberman In The New York Times

Fascinating stuff:

"...Q. Are there any practical benefits to your research?

A. There are. A majority of the undergraduates who register for my evolutionary anatomy and physiology class here at Harvard are pre-medical students. Learning this will help them become better doctors. Many of the conditions they’ll be treating are rooted in the mismatch between the world we live in today and the Paleolithic bodies we’ve inherited.

For example, impacted wisdom teeth and malocclusions are very recent problems. They arise because we now process our food so much that we chew with little force. These interactions affect how our faces grow, which causes previously unknown dental problems. Hunter-gatherers — who live in ways similar to our ancestors — don’t have impacted wisdom teeth or cavities. There are many other conditions rooted in the mismatch — fallen arches, osteoporosis, cancer, myopia, diabetes and back trouble. So understanding evolutionary biology will definitely help my students when they become orthopedists, orthodontists and craniofacial surgeons....

...Q. In your lab, you study the phenomenon of barefoot running. How did that become part of your portfolio?

"...A. About a year after the Nature paper came out, I gave a public lecture where this bearded guy, with only socks and duct tape on his feet, came up to me and said, “I don’t like to wear shoes when I run — how come?” He’d become a barefoot runner because his feet hurt in shoes. The man was “Barefoot Jeffrey,” a Harvard grad who owned a bicycle shop in Jamaica Plains. What a great question!

"Obviously, people had run barefoot for millions of years before shoes, socks, Nikes. I’d sometimes wondered if some of the sports injuries that runners get are related to an issue connected to how people run in shoes — the heel strike, it’s called. When most of us run, we land hard on our heels, and that causes a shockwave and it travels up your leg and eventually hits your head, which jiggles really fast. Those of us who wear shoes think that’s normal, to land with a big jolt.

"So I asked Barefoot Jeffrey to come to the lab and show me how he ran. He ran in this beautiful way that was completely collision-free. Light as a feather. When he hit the ground, he didn’t land on his heel. Instead, he landed on the ball of his foot, and there was no shock wave that hit his head. That led us to producing another paper in Nature where we actually studied barefoot runners like Jeffrey.

"We also went to Africa and went to people who’d never worn shoes. What we discovered was that people who run barefoot tend to run differently than people who wear modern shoes; they run in a much lighter and gentler way because it would hurt to run the way people do in shoes..."

Read the whole thing.

Barefoot Running and The Smoking Gun

Amby Burfoot discussed this paper today: "Foot Strike Pattern Does Not Predict Loading Rates During Shod or Barefoot Running" (Becker, et al).  As always, he uses the results to denigrate the barefoot-style running movement, "Let's Stop Making Generalizations About Foot Strikes, Shoe Choices, And Injury Risks"

I took a quick look at the paper.  In order to understand it, you need to also look at this paper: "The Relationship Between Lower-Extremity Stress Fractures and the Ground Reaction" (Zadpoor, et al), which contains the definition of "instantaneous vertical loading rate (VILR)".

In a nutshell, VILR is the slope of the impact when the foot initially contacts the ground.  Prof. Lieberman found that the VILR is less steep in barefoot runners, since the heel does not make the initial contact with the ground.  His finding is illustrated in these two images from his website:

As you can see, that's quite a dramatic difference.  Lieberman et al found that nearly all runners change their stride when you take their shoes off: they stop heel striking, and the impact transient goes away.  He's not the only one.  Hamill, et al in "Impact Characteristics in Shod and Barefoot Running"  (Covered by Mr. Burfoot here) had a similar result.  Pete the Runblogger summarized the study thus:

"As Steve said, this was a simple study with a simple hypothesis. Basically they showed that if you take a sample of runners accustomed to heel striking and have them run down a runway either in 4mm drop shoes of varying thickness or barefoot, barefoot differs than the 4mm drop shoes. I think most here would agree with this result. You take a heel striking runner accustomed to marshmallow shoes and put them in the Minimus and have them run down the road ten times, I'm guessing that they will still be heel strikers. You have them run barefoot and things change, which is why we all view barefoot as the best way to get a feel for our default stride. So what this shows is that changing to a 4mm drop shoe is not necessarily enough to change your gait in any fundamental way, but going barefoot is. I actually think these results are pretty cool and support what everyone here is saying all of the time. Barefoot is different than a 4mm drop shoe, and unless you work to alter your ingrained motor patterns, going to a low drop shoe in and of itself may not change very much from an impact standpoint, at least over the short term...."

So Lieberman and Hamill both found that barefoot runners run differently than shod do.  The effect is so reliable that Pete uses it as a parlor trick in his classes.  Becker's paper found the same thing: the "center of pressure" for barefoot runners was dramatically different from shod:

Dramatic change, no?

So, like the others, he finds that the barefoot runners land with the pressure on the forefoot, not the heel.

So how does Becker, et al make the claim that the VILR does not differ between shod and barefoot?  Zadpoor defines VILR in this easy-to-understand graph:

Clear, right?  T is the period of the VILR.

I don't know.  Unfortunately Becker does not explain what they are using for VILR.  They also mention that they're using the "Strike Index" from Cavanagh, et al.  That paper doesn't include the word "index", so I again don't know what they're talking about...

What I suspect was happening is that their barefoot runners may have been running with a bit of a heel strike, which beginning barefoot-style runners can do, especially if they're running on a softer surface, and are used to heel-striking.  They quickly get out of the habit, as it hurts.  Again, Pete the Runblogger experienced this first-hand.

"Subjects ran continuous laps around a 25 meter track in the laboratory under both shod and barefoot conditions."

That's the only explanation I can find for why all the running studies but this one find that going barefoot reduces the impact transient in near-100% of runners. Either that, or they weren't measuring the VILR correctly (which I suspect, as they show it as being higher, not lower, for the barefoot runners).  I've seen some evidence that barefoot-style running increases the Ground Reactive Force (GRF), while eliminating the VILR.  Becker may well be reporting GRF as VILR, but it's tough to tell from that summary.

Why is this whole issue important?  Neither Amby nor Becker goes into this issue, but if you read Zadpoor ,which this new study is attempting to refute, you'll see why it's important:

"The results of the fixed-effect meta-analysis of all included studies (Table 4) show that there is no significant difference between the vertical GRF peaks of the stress fracture group and those of the control group (PN0.05, Table 4). However, the AVLR and [VILR] are significantly higher for the stress fracture group (Pb0.05, Table 4). The same conclusion holds when the meta-analysis is performed only within the tibial or metatarsal stress fracture groups, except in the case of the [VILR] of the metatarsal fracture group for which only one study is included (Table 4)."

So there's a non-random relationship between the impact transient, and stress fractures.  Eliminating the impact transient should reduce stress-fracture injuries, and the best way to do this reliably is to eliminate the shoes or wear barefoot-style (no heel-cushion) shoes.

In other words, sneakers cause stress fractures.

From Zadpoor:

"Lower-limb stress fractures are among the most common injuries to athletes and military recruits (Fredericson et al., 2006; James et al., 1978; Kowal, 1980; McBryde, 1985; Milner et al., 2006a). According to one report, up to 20% of all sports medicine clinical injuries are lowerlimb stress fractures (Fredericson et al., 2006). Stress fractures are also a major problem for military recruits. According to Ross and Allsopp (Ross and Allsopp, 2002), stress fracture is the most common reason for the loss of training days for Royal Marine Recruits. These injuries cause so many lost training days due to the fact that stress fractures are among the more severe injuries of the lower-extremity musculoskeletal system, and need extended periods (4 to 8 weeks (Brukner et al., 1998)) of refraining from physically-demanding activities for
recovery (Friedl et al., 1992; Jones et al., 1993; Macera et al., 1989; Rauh et al., 2006)."

The smoking gun, in other words. 

No wonder Amby likes Becker's study, if it's correct there is no smoking gun, and he's not been peddling snake-oil for the last few decades. 

But I think it's pretty clear that it's not correct.

P.S. Related post: Barefoot Running and Shin Splints:

"However, gait retraining using real time feedback has been shown to reduce [tibial shock] during running up to 25%."

Barefoot Running According to Ken Bob Saxton

This is too good to die in the comments of a NY Times story:

"Barefoot running is not simply running, except without the shoes!

"I recommend starting out on gravel, or a rough surface to help resist the temptation of; 1) pushing any part of the foot into the ground hard (heel or fore-foot), 2) skidding, twisting, or grinding your feet into the ground, 3) going too far, too soon (before you have learned to run gently, efficiently, and gracefully)

"Do NOT try to learn barefoot running in minimalist footwear!

"Invariably the reports I have seen and heard of people getting stressinjuries from "barefoot" running, were NOT even BAREfooted, but rather the were running minimalist ("barefoot") footwear, or occasionally barefooters avoiding challenging terrain, like gravel or rough asphalt.

"DO NOT confuse barefoot running with running in "barefoot" shoes - they are as different as night and day, blindfolded and clear-sighted, senseless and sensible.

"We were blessed with sensitive soles for the same reason we don't like to hold our hand in the fire for long. It hurts to do stupid things. Bad running technique hurts in bare feet, especially on gravel or rough surfaces. Pain is a warning that if we continue holding our hand in the fire, it will cause serious damage!

"On rough surfaces, we learn to run gently in much shorter time, because it hurts to run badly in barefoot, especially on rough terrain. That's why I encourage people not to avoid rough surfaces, but embrace them, to see them as educating. Running barefoot on gravel trails was my graduate school.

"One reason people want minimalist footwear is because it hurts to run barefoot badly, and because adults don't like to change the way we run. After all, that will take time, patience, learning, and change...

"Adults all-too-often will accept injury in the future, in order to continue running badly - in a way that would hurt if we were barefoot (or without pain-killers), rather than taking the time to figure out how to run more gently, with less pain.

"Which is why I also encourage people to become more like children. Do NOT commit yourself to X number of miles, or X number of minutes. Instead, try having fun, playing, experimenting, and listening to your bare soles. They really do want us to LEARN to run and walk more gently, and with less injury.

"Children take a few steps, and fall down, and are excited that they took a few steps. Children aren't wondering when they'll be able to run their next marathon!

"So be more child-like, curious, interested in learning, without worrying so much about how far you'll be able to run today, or tomorrow, and before you know it, you may be able to run further, faster, and more often than you ever could with shoes!

"That has been my experience, and the experience of hundreds, perhaps thousands of others barefoot runners I've been in contact with since creating the original Running Barefoot website in 1997.

"What Lieberman, Davis, and others are discovering in research, barefoot runners have known for as long as we can remember.

"Barefoot Ken Bob Saxton
co-author: Barefoot Running Step by Step
founder: The Barefoot Running website (since 1997)"

New Study on Possible Paleo Diets

From Boyd Eaton, Loren Cordain, and others.  Don Matesz discusses it here:

"...The team excluded the possibility of evolutionary diets consisting of more than 70% of energy from animal foods for two main reasons. First, during the main part of human evolution our ancestors did not have the technology required for hunting the largest, fattest game animals, or being top carnivores, and more likely depended on scavenging for most land animal meat. Scavenging does not often supply large amounts of meat or fat simply because obligate carnivores eat those parts before humans get to them (something I will discuss in the next post)....

"...In other words, despite having more advanced technology than had by human ancestors 100, 000 years ago, modern hunter-gatherers typically do not obtain more than 35% of their food from hunting...."

I find this uncompelling.  As Prof. Dan Lieberman shows, humans are uniquely adapted to a carnivororous role.  We've likely been the dominant carnivore for at least 2 million years and for 1.8 million of those years, we were catching large animals without weapons.

The Megafauna extinctions have been going on for a very long time, and correspond with humanity's spread around the globe.  The most likely cause of these extinctions is human predatation of the "largest, fattest game animals".

Given the blind spot in the Paleo community for the unique human adaptation to hunting via endurance running, it's not surprising that Eaton, Cordain, & co. ignore this aspect of human behavior, but I don't think it's good science.

But of course the entire exercise is hypothetical, although interesting, as it's not possible to know exactly what our ancient ancestors ate.  Likely it was a large range of foods, as available, but meat was pretty clearly a regular item, and it was not scavenged.

Dan Lieberman vs. Steve Robbins

This is unfortunate.  But, as Jason notes, scientists are human too.

Chris McDougall's Born to Run Cabaret is Finally Online

Full video is here.  Prof. Lieberman's segment is here.  If you've never seen Lieberman speak, I highly recommend it.  He could easily quit Harvard and do stand-up comedy.

The lady doing the Hula routine is McDougall's wife.

I went to see this in person last fall, and had a great dinner with Barefoot Ted and John Durant and John's sister Maggie afterward.  It was a great evening.

(Barefoot Ted walks faster than any person I've ever met, and I thought I was the fastest walker around...)

"'On the Move' Gets Harvard Going"

Christopher McDougall and Professor Lieberman both spoke at this event.

Article About Prof. Daniel Lieberman

"'It turns out barefoot runners are about 5 percent more economical than shod runners, even after you account for the weight of the shoe,' he reports. 'We are trying to figure out why.'"

Very interesting article about some of the research projects Lieberman's working on.  You've got to like a guy who puts shoes on sheep.
From John Durant.