You’re walking all wrong

I’ve always had a penchant for shoes as a soley aesthetic and nonfunctional article of clothing. It was less about the technology and more about my awkwardness with my flat feet. Though I tried my best to stay in shoes rather than walking barefoot, I’ve gotten used to the specific pains that come with walking in uncomfortable shoes after years of sticking it out with pair after pair of pretty but altogether useless sneakers. New York Magazine has a great feature on the debate between footwear and going barefoot, comparing the alternatives and risks for each side.

“Natural gait is biomechanically impossible for any shoe-wearing person,” wrote Dr. William A. Rossi in a 1999 article in Podiatry Management. “It took 4 million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive form of gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement head to foot.” In other words: Feet good. Shoes bad.

So I’m torn between whether my symptoms are a result of bearing with ergonomically inferior shoes for far too long, or just having flat feet being the cause of not fitting into the mold of your typical shoe.

Here’s another example: If you wear high heels for a long time, your tendons shorten—and then it’s only comfortable for you to wear high heels. One saleswoman I spoke to at a running-shoe store described how, each summer, the store is flooded with young women complaining of a painful tingling in the soles of their feet—what she calls “flip-flop-itis,” which is the result of women’s suddenly switching from heeled winter boots to summer flip-flops. This is the shoe paradox: We’ve come to believe that shoes, not bare feet, are natural and comfortable, when in fact wearing shoes simply creates the need for wearing shoes.

Having gotten accustomed to wearing shoes while living in New York, I get more of a phantom-itis with being bare foot. Since reading this article a few days ago, I’ve been actively trying to re-enable the equilibrium in my own feet through slower and more intentional steps.

Barefoot walking is, in its mechanics, very similar to barefoot running. The idea is to eliminate the hard-heel strike and employ something closer to a mid-strike: landing softly on the heel but rolling immediately through the outside of your foot, then across the ball and pushing off with the toes, with a kind of figure-eight movement though the foot.

It actually feels really weird to let your own feet roll through each step and use the toes to grasp onto the floor. My only problem is the numbness I get from just reading the actual article; I feel as though I’m in a constant state of sore for all the years of being ignorant to my inability to walk.