George Sheehan observed “Most people live nowhere near their physical limits. They settle for accelerated aging, an early and precipitous fall. They give aging a bad name. Too many people entering their forties are performing at physiological levels more appropriate to somebody sixty years old."
We must teach our patients not to be happy with the precipitous fall. Normal should be viewed as the best one can be at any age. Our aging citizens have discarded what is not useful and what is trivial in their lives. They are enjoying the fruits of many years of work. We owe it to them to give them the opportunity to live these years in the spirit of their childhood, to play, to exercise, and live these years as peak experience.
[Article includes video: Barefoot Running Style]
Kids these days! I sound like my grandparents saying that, but the difference is while they were perhaps referring to some punk kid tailgating them on their way home from their weekly Bingo game, I’m referring to the kids walking around in pumped-up-kicks whose health and fitness levels fall very short of achieving any Presidential Fitness Award.
This is a great question and one I get asked frequently. There isn't a set formula that can be applied to all situations. There is a big difference between transitioning to a Newton shoe, a pair of FiveFingers, or completely barefoot. Newton shoes have more protection than your bare feet and therefore will require less time to safely adapt than a pure minimalist shoe. The most important question to ask is whether you are prepared to set your goal as running barefoot/minimalist rather than a set amount of mileage per week.
Don’t ask me to explain what triggered the decision because I honestly can’t remember. What I can tell you is that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. A few years ago, my feet were confined to every possible permutation of footwear. I literally never went anywhere without a pair of shoes or boots on my feet – even the beach! You could accurately deduce that I was a junkie of laces and soles, but all that changed sometime between the Fall of 2008 and Spring of 2009.
Plantar Fasciitis is the common term for what should be more accurately termed Plantar Fasciosis. itits is an acute inflammation caused by a trauma or infection. osis is chronic degenerative condition. No evidence exists for an ideal treatment of this condition without identifying and treating the causes, which can be many. Since we have no literature to guide us, this advice comes from seeing hundreds of runners and guiding them in self corrections.
