3 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Running Barefoot

I used foot coffins (a.k.a. shoes) for decades. When I ditched them and started running barefoot, I naïvely thought it would be a simple "swap the gear, run the miles" kind of shift. Nope. My body had other plans.

1 - Your body will keep changing for months (and it's not bad)

Once I got out of shoes, every few weeks something subtle would shift - tendons recalibrating, arches coming back to life, posture realigning, hips stabilizing. It wasn't painful - just different.
I wish someone had told me it might take a year or more for my body to fully "re-learn" natural movement after a lifetime of padding and bracing with professional orthotics.

2 - FiveFingers were worse for me than being fully barefoot

Controversial? Probably. True for me? Absolutely.
Every time I wore Vibram FiveFingers, I had more discomfort than when I ran with nothing on my feet at all.

Here's why I think it happened:

• The "shoe-like" feel still signaled my brain to heel-strike
• I was still protecting instead of adapting
• I was still running like a shoe-wearer in a minimalist costume

And the research is starting to catch up - there are injury reports showing that so-called "barefoot shoes" may actually cause more issues than pure barefooting. There is no such thing as a barefoot shoe. Barefoot is barefoot. (Disclaimer: I do realize that extreme weather conditions may require you to have some type of footwear.)

3 - "Take it slow" means painfully, comically slow

I was a marathoner. So my ego told me, "If I can run 26 miles in shoes, I can do 5 miles barefoot to start."
Wrong.
My first barefoot run was a quarter mile. And that was enough.

Barefoot running is not just running without shoes - it is retraining your entire nervous system and mechanics from the ground up. If you go too fast, you will sabotage yourself.

Which one resonates with you the most - 1, 2, or 3?