‘Wall Street Journal’ bares its sole

By Budd Glassberg/Times Sentinel columnist

January 11, 2007 06:55 pm

— “Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; And only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I guess I am going to have to respond. Following last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal front page article written by Joseph Pereira, on the topic of barefoot marathoners, I received two copies of the article and four e-mails with links to the WSJ online article, from readers of this column. Then, the article was reprinted last Sunday in a local paper, followed by a new deluge of e-mails to me from readers.
Pereira’s article made an attempt at objectivity, but was definitely slanted on the side of making most barefoot runners appear to go through a lot of pain in order to run shoeless. He purposely painted the barefoot marathoner as a masochist by highlighting Tsuryoshi Yoshino, a 32-year-old graduate student at San Diego State who talks about “getting used to the pain” and puncturing a three-inch-long blister with a sewing needle. He then misrepresented Ken Bob Saxton, a barefoot marathoner who promotes this type of running with his Web site (www.runningbarefoot.org), by introducing Saxton in the article with the words, “Because it demands discipline and a high tolerance of pain.” Saxton has never referred to barefoot runners needing a high tolerance of pain; quite the opposite. He has written that running shod (with shoes) often requires the runner to have a high tolerance of pain. He believes, as I do, running barefoot may allow the runner to learn to run more gently and avoid many of the injuries shod runners get by slamming their feet on the ground. Cushioned shoes block the feedback that we need to improve the way we run and avoid pain.
The WSJ article goes on to interview a neophyte barefoot runner who is quoted as saying, “It’s like running on sandpaper,” among other things to suggest that if you run without shoes, you must be a nutcase. Pereira had interviewed several experienced and novice people in a barefoot running forum, to which I also belong, who had successfully made the changeover from shoes to barefoot. He chose instead to quote those who rushed the transition and ended up with blisters and sore feet. The article would have been more balanced had he mentioned the many runners who followed Saxton’s advice for running barefoot, and did not end up with the problems of the runners quoted in the article.
People who see me running barefoot have asked me if it hurts. I respond that it only hurts when I run with bad form. While in shoes, I have to think about keeping good form because the shoes allow me to run improperly, temporarily without pain. If I run with bad form running barefoot, it does hurt. By running barefoot, I get constant feedback on my form and can therefore make a habit of good running form. I can do so without a lot of the pain and blisters that were emphasized in the WSJ article. The difficulty is that you must be patient and ease into barefoot running. Most runners want quick results and will run barefoot too far too soon.
The WSJ article concludes with a quote from a New York attorney who tried running without shoes earlier this year on a friend’s recommendation. He said, “Humans are too far up the evolutionary chain to be trying this kind of stuff.” This statement suggests that because we have the ability to manufacture shoes, we are somehow too advanced to go without them. This is a curious conclusion with flawed logic akin to the reasoning that because we can hydrogenate oils, we ought to use it in our cooking instead of natural oils.
I suppose any publicity about going barefoot can be of use in getting people to question the status quo. But I find it unsettling that reporters so willingly grab for the shock value in a story in order to sell papers, rather than do the due diligence necessary to provide a balanced report. I guess it should not surprise me much given that the WSJ placed a shoe advertisement just under the second page of the article.