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You’ve heard of the bare­foot run­ning move­ment, right?  The one in which peo­ple run marathons shod only in their own cal­luses. This to me in the pin­na­cle of insan­ity. Not because of the bare­foot thing but because of the run­ning thing. See, I don’t run. I haven’t since my mid20’s when my left knee blew out for the sec­ond time while I was tak­ing a swing at a base­ball. In fact, my whole left leg below the thigh, from the bum knee to the ankle with iffy car­ti­lage to the bunions on both sides of my foot, basi­cally sucks. This isn’t a prob­lem until I want to do things like walk more than a mile, climb stairs, and oh, run. So when I read about how bare­foot marathon­ing was sup­posed to cure what ails you in run­ning, I was intrigued. Not that I want to run any­where, but because walk­ing up a flight of stairs with­out that sucky knee scream­ing at me would be nice.

While I was doing my intrigued reading—the best kind, by the way—I hap­pened over a shoe designed for peo­ple who want to go bare­foot but can’t. Again, I was intrigued (yes, I know I’m easy that way) and did lots of research on the Vibram Five Fin­gers shoes.  Lots of peo­ple love them. Very few peo­ple think they suck, which ele­vates them above the typ­i­cal As Seen on TV Prod­uct. So I bought a pair, the KSO style. KSO stands for Keep Stuff Out.

Try­ing on the shoes is an adven­ture. You put them on the floor and kind of inch your toes into the slots.  The prob­lem for me is the pinkie toe. My left one is basi­cally a use­less hunk of meat that does not respond to my com­mands, so it’s like wrig­gling some­thing that’s shaped like a ques­tion mark into an excla­ma­tion mark. I’m hop­ing it will get eas­ier with prac­tice.  Long term, I’m also hop­ing that the shoes them­selves will do what everyone’s says they will do—change my gait so that it’s more nat­ural, there­fore reduc­ing strain on my knees and hips.

After get­ting home and wig­gling into the shoes, I took a quick walk around the block. The first impres­sion: man, I hit the ground hard with my heel. In the min­i­mal­is­tic Five Fin­gers, the shock of that strike went straight up my leg and into my spine.  Ouch.  It took only a few steps before the shock inspired me to find a less uncom­fort­able stride. Soon, I found myself mov­ing to a mid-sole step that popped my on my toes as I moved to the next step.  There was no pain asso­ci­ated with the change, except for my lower abs, which weren’t used to being worked on a walk. It’s not quite like going bare­foot, but it’s close enough that you feed rocks and sticks if you step on them.

So far today, I’ve worn the Five Fin­gers both with and with­out socks (Injinji sells socks per­fect for the Vibrams) for a few hours. At the Locusts’ request, I switched to ASICS run­ning shoes when we went out, and the ache in my knees and bunions came right back. So far, so good.

Now if only my pinkie toe would learn to cooperate.

Vibram Five Fin­gers, new out of the box.

On my feet. Quack. Quack.

What the Locusts, fash­ion­istas that they are, think of the shoes.