Experimenting with Minimalist Running Shoes

At the end of 2022, after finishing my Ironman training and racing, I stumbled on a book called Born to Run. A book with a lot of stories and ideas about people who run crazy distances (much longer than a marathon), specifically on how to stay injury free while doing such crazy events. This sparked an intense interest for me because I’ve had my fair share of running related issues in the past – ranging from injuries that kept me from running for weeks at a time in 2021 and a wide variety of pain and minor injuries leading up to the Ironman. Fortunately, nothing that kept me out of training or prevented me from racing, but I certainly could have been healthier throughout the year.

One of the key concepts that the book focused on was returning to a more natural use of our feet – including the heel to toe drop from running shoes (most running shoes today have a heel that is higher than the toe of the shoe) and most of the padding that protects our feet from the outside world. The idea being that today’s running shoes are too restrictive for our feet and force us into an unnatural running position that inevitably leads to injury. The end result of this thought process is called a “minimalist” shoe, which removes both the heel to toe height difference and nearly all the padding from the bottom of the shoe.

With no race on the calendar for at least 6+ months, I decided to give it a shot and bought a pair of Xero HFS shoes. These shoes were flat from the heel to toe (10 mm is the standard for most shoes) and had a sole that is around 25-30% of the thickness of an average running shoe.

With just a small amount of research into the topic, it became clear that the most important thing to do when trying these shoes was to work into them as slowly as possible – it is extremely common to end up with an injury in the early days of this transition because our feet are so conditioned to being in highly padded and elevated shoes. This brought several considerations top of mind when it came to my strategy:

• Minimal padding between my feet and the ground – this causes your feet to work a lot harder to stabilize and move you forward. It also allows you, for better or worse, to feel everything that you are running over.
  • In order to mitigate this risk, I started doing daily exercises to strengthen the muscles in my feet – this would be important to get my feet strong enough to handle this additional load
• Zero heel to toe drop – while 10mm may not seem like much, it makes a world of difference in terms of what muscles you use while running. This forces you to run more on your forefoot, which utilizes a lot more of your calves and achilles with each step
  • I also started doing daily calf strengthening and plyometric exercises to get my calves ready for this shift – it turned out that I was way underprepared for this

Next up was how to plan out the transition into the Xero shoes. In addition to the strength work that I was doing, my coach helped lay out an extremely conservative plan to make sure that I minimized the chance of any possible injuries. In addition to daily strength work, the running plan looked like this:

• 1 month of only walking the dog in them each day (2-4 miles per day)
• 1 month of warm-up only – 5-15 minutes of running, 2-3 times per week
• 3 months of slowly progressing mileage in the Xero vs regular shoes – starting with the first mile of each run (3-4 times per week) and increasing by 1 mile each week until all of my mileage is eventually covered

This plan turned out to work well – I was able to stick with this plan throughout the entire 5 months and build up to running 20-25 miles per week in the Xero shoes, which I would have thought to be impossible when I first put them on (you can immediately feel the difference). There were plenty of challenges and learnings throughout this transition, which taught me a lot about my feet and running in general:

• My calves were nowhere near strong enough at the start – the first handful of times I ran more than 3 miles in the minimalist shoes, I could barely walk the next day because my calves were so sore
  • This is likely an impact of the shoe being flat from toe to heel, which forces me to run more on my forefoot and use a lot more of my calves with each step
• It forced me to focus a lot on my running form, specifically how my feet are landing on the ground with each step for the first time – part of the “benefit” of wearing minimalist shoes is that it exposes any issues with your form, balance, or strength quickly
  • I think this is largely due to the nearly non-existent padding on these shoes, if you land on the wrong part of your foot, you feel it immediately
• I hadn’t realized it while it was happening, but all of the pain, soreness, and strain that I used to have in my knees had completely disappeared – I used to think that some of these issues were inevitable when running long distances, but this experience made me reframe these into solvable problems
  • This is one of the main benefits that I was chasing after with shifting towards forefoot running
• Running on concrete with minimal padding to protect your feet is tough – I eventually made it up to doing a couple of 10 mile runs in the minimalist shoes, but I never felt confident enough in them to think I would eventually be able to run a full marathon in them later this year

At the end of this 5-month transition was the 4x4x48 challenge, in which I would be running 48 miles over the course of 48 hours – obviously well above the 20-25 miles per week that I had been able to achieve with the minimalist shoes to date. Going into the challenge, my original plan was to run half of the 48 miles (every other 4-mile segment) in the minimalist shoes and the other half in my regular Asics shoes. Unfortunately, after the first few segments, I had a couple of sore calves and could start to feel my feet getting sore – with 38 miles left, it was clear that I wasn’t going to make it to 48 miles with this strategy. At that point, I cut the minimalist shoes and ran the remainder in my Asics, leaving that problem for another day.

Coming out of the 4x4x48 challenge, I had to decide what to do with my shoe choice going forward. Considering that I had a marathon to run in 6 months, I had to decide what kind of shoe I was going to wear going forward – theoretically, I was done transitioning into the minimalist shoes, though I didn’t feel totally confident wearing them on longer runs. I felt like I had gained all kinds of benefits in my knees and running speed, but I struggled to do longer runs without any of the padding from a normal running shoe. This thought process ultimately led me to seek the best of both worlds – a shoe with no heel to toe drop, which would keep me running on my forefoot; but also something with a little more padding, which I felt was probably more realistic when it comes to running primarily on concrete. This combination seems to have been found with Altra running shoes, which have a more standard amount of cushioning, but share all of features in minimalist shoes (wide toe box, no drop, light weight). My first try with those shoes is the Altra Escalante 3. So far, they seem to be the exact solution that I have been looking for. When you compare the two shoes side by side, it is pretty clear which is which based on the thickness of the bottom of the shoe – the minimalist shoe on the right and Altra on the left.