Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

can look forward to more and more malfunctions. They take a beating, those feet. Even a lazy American still walks the equivalent of the earth’s circumference in his or her lifetime.

I spot McDougall. He’s a tall man with his Vibrams tucked into the waistband of his forest-green shorts. A purple do-rag covers his bald head.

I introduce myself. He’s warm and welcoming—and just as surprised as anyone that his “niche book,” as he calls it, sold nearly a million copies and started a movement. The idea of the 2009 tome is simple. Our feet evolved to run barefoot, which is what humans have been doing for thousands of years. Then along came these foot prisons called shoes. In the 1970s, Nike made everything worse with their fixation on soft padding. Instead of preventing injuries—which is what sneakers promised—they actually caused them. They encouraged us to land hard on the heel, putting stress on the knees and the shins. McDougall’s ideal runners are a tribe in Mexico’s Copper Canyon called the Tarahumara, who wear slender pieces of rubber strapped to their feet.

I bought Vibrams a few months ago. When I brought them home, Julie and the boys had a nice belly laugh at the way they looked on my feet.

“Poor Ashton Kutcher. He can’t wear them,” Julie said, showing me a line in the manual that says Vibrams won’t fit on webbed feet. Apparently, Kutcher has webbed feet. My wife’s knowledge of pop culture knows no bounds.

I took a couple of runs in them. I haven’t yet decided on whether I prefer them to sneakers. The Vibrams have their advantages: The rubber is so thin, you feel like you’re jogging around New York in bare feet. You can make out the contours of the curb with your toes. Which is liberating and hilarious, an almost naughty, sensation. Bare feet! In the city! It’s like Columbus Avenue has merged with your bedroom, or has magically transformed into a Caribbean beach. And so far, no rusty nails or blisters.

I’m wearing my Vibrams for today’s run. I wish I could have gone full McDougall, but I’m germaphobic, and fear contact between my naked soles and the sidewalk, so Vibrams it is.

McDougall gathers us round to give us a primer on technique. We’re told to land lightly on the front of the foot and let the heels just kiss the ground.

Take small steps. Cushy sneakers encourage long strides because the heels don’t hurt as they pound the ground. But that’s not what humans are meant to do. And also, try to pull your legs up instead of stomping them down.

“Think of it like you have pancakes on your upper thighs, and you’re trying to raise your knees to flip them,” McDougall says.

And perhaps, most important, it’s about being joyful when you run.

And with that, off we go. We trot west on 125th Street, past shops and street vendors selling Bob Marley posters. We look a little odd, flipping our imaginary pancakes, and we do not go unnoticed by the pedestrians.

“Put on some damn shoes!”

“Stop running like a bunch of girls!” (The toe running does have a certain prancing tenor to it.)

“White people are taking over Harlem!”

We enter the park and head up a gentle hill, making our way toward the reservoir. I catch up with McDougall, and we pat along.

“Look at this,” he says, stopping and showing me the bottom of his foot. It’s midnight black.

“Do you worry about stepping on things?” I huff.

“It doesn’t bother me. I live in rural Pennsylvania, so I step in all sorts of things. Horseshit, you name it. You learn to avoid the sharp objects,” he says.

I ask him to critique my running.

“You’ve got a heel-heavy stride, man!”

I land too hard on the back of my foot. I try leaning forward more. “That’s better,” McDougall says.

I tell him that I sometimes run on the treadmill at the gym, which I suspect he thinks is a bad idea. I’m right.

“You tend to want to race the treadmill, so you take big strides,” he says. “If you have to do it, my advice would be to go right up to the front of the treadmill, so your hips are right against the bars. Not to get too carnal about it, but get up there and go at it.” He mimes a dry hump. It may seem lascivious, McDougall says, but at least you’ll be taking smaller steps.

McDougall trots off to help another runner. A few minutes later, we’re running down a Central Park path, all sixty of us, when we see a stocky jogger heading right toward us.

He grimaces as he tries to navigate his way through this river of half-barefoot people.

“Oh, come on!” he shouts as he brushes by us.

“Wow, he seemed angry,” I say.

“I think it’s because he was wearing shoes,” says a barefoot woman.

We laugh.

“They were probably too tight and giving him bad energy.”

“He’s like the Grinch. His shoes are two sizes too small,” calls out another runner.

I love being an insider, a member of the shoeless Mafia. Those poor squares trapped in their sneaker jails. But as for the pure joy of running that McDougall speaks about? I’m not feeling it.

The Appropriately Named Foot Doctor

A couple of weeks later, I ended up in the office of Dr. Krista Archer. Dr. Archer is a respected foot surgeon in New York with shoulder-length blond hair. She often appears on morning TV to talk about, say, how to minimize damage from stiletto heels.

I’d come to see her for some advice on how to have the healthiest feet, and also to get her take on the great barefoot debate.

Should I exercise without shoes?

“I’m not an advocate,” she says.

She explains: If you have no foot problems, if your feet are models of biomechanical perfection, going shoeless might be fine. But if you have any quirks, if, for instance, your foot rolls inward or outward too much, then put on the sneakers.

“Running puts a huge load on the feet—three times the body weight