Minimalist Misadventures: Chapter 2

It all started more than a year before the Foot of Africa Marathon when I bought a pair of Nike Free Run's. These shoes looked quite cool and I was impressed by their light weight. I had read some articles about a new trend involving lighter more elegant running shoes and I thought these might be the weapon of choice to kick start my otherwise dormant running programme. I had not been actively running for several years which in itself was not too unusual for me. Over a twenty six year road running history there were many times that I had taken a sabbatical for a year or two or three. During these off times I had explored the merits of flyfishing and motorcycling, but running always seemed to draw me back at some point and I would get going once again.  

The past few years however had been different. I wasn't running largely because I couldn't run. Well, I couldn't run for more than about 45 minutes, after which spasms and pain in my rear-end and hamstrings reduced me to a cripple. I had done the Google searches and the physio visits and after some temporary relief they all left me exactly where I had started before the intervention and the expense. My feeling was that age had finally caught up with me and I would not do much running in the years ahead which would soon see me turning fifty. The information at my disposal was that I possibly had a piriformis problem or a sciatic problem or in the opinion of one physiotherapist, my one leg was now suddenly shorter than the other. In any event the only real solution seemed to lie in a stretching routine and so I set about on an excruciating daily stretching programme. But every morning I was still afflicted with tension which was clearly worse than before. Stretching only seemed to add to my distress so I eventually gave up both stretching and running. 

And then I was drawn to the Nike Free Runs. With visions of renewed vigour I once again set about trying to develop some running fitness. It wasn't very inspiring and I thought I was getting stronger until I got to enter a half marathon which ended in the usual muscle spasms and walking. Even these new shoes were powerless against the vagaries of age, I thought. Some people kept on running forever but not me, I was one of the unlucky ones. My six foot frame which was never really suited to endurance running had caught up with me, as had several broken bones, including two vertebrae and a leg, from some motorbike mishaps. I would grow old fly-fishing. That was it. 

Who knows why I then spent time searching for information about running shoes but I did. I had already given my almost new Nike Free Runs to the gardener and I was developing a grudge against the retailers and big brand advertisers that promised so much and delivered so little at such exorbitant cost. Whatever they promised had not come my way. Yet for a strange reason, that to this day I cannot identify, I kept believing there must be a better way to run, a better way, that is, for me to run. And so late one night in December, after I had been trawling through countless internet sites looking for something that I didn't know existed, I found the Bite Xtension running sandal. This was incredible. A running sandal! Just the pictures of it excited me and I felt like I was living through a Eureka moment. I ran to my wife and loudly proclaimed "Why don't we run in sandals, who needs shoes?" It seemed so obvious to me and so compelling. 

And thus, the discovery process began. It wasn't really about Bite Xtension sandals which indeed are probably not that good. It was more about the art of running naturally. It was only a few days later and a few days before Christmas while standing in a queue at a bookstore, that I spotted a book called ‘The Complete Idiots Guide to Barefoot Running’. It struck me that this book was for COMPLETE idiots rather than being the COMPLETE guide for idiots. The insinuation was obvious. This book was on the rack for discounted items but even I knew that by picking it up I had relegated myself to the ranks of complete idiocy. But it was cheap and I bought it.

The Complete Idiots Guide to Barefoot Running is very easy to read and I was instantly drawn to the theory of lower impact midfoot striking, higher cadence and footstrikes under the centre of body mass. It just made sense to me and it all seemed so logical. The key to all of this was that man was made to run in shoes that were flat, or preferably no shoes at all. Raised heels were the enemy and we needed to rail against this unnecessary elevation that forced a most unnatural gait. Now that I had a little bit of information (which we all know marks the peak of danger) I was back on the Google machine looking for the next important step in my new pursuit. I was going to find some running sandals and buy them.

But this never happened. Instead I came across Steven Sashen's Invisible Shoe website which explained how to make your own minimalist running sandals. This sandal was in the spirit of footwear used by a tribe of Indians whose name I couldn't master .... Tara or Mara or something. The Complete Idiots Guide had given me what I needed to know and now Steven Sashen was showing me how to do it. I don't know why I was so fired up but I was. The information was so entrancing and I was dumbstruck by the prospect that not only had I been wrong for more than two decades but the whole world of runners was also wrong. We all did it wrong! 

The Invisible Shoe sandal is basically something along the lines of the Tarahumara Indian huarache, huarache being their home-styled sandals. At the time I knew nothing of this Indian tribe and I didn't bother about it too much because I was rushing off to the local hardware store to buy some rubber car mats and different types of string, rope or twine. I was going to make sandals. Back at home in the hot December afternoon I traced the outlines of my feet onto pieces of paper, transferred these to the rubber mats and cut out what was soon to be my first pair of running sandals. I made the necessary holes, threaded and looped the cord, and tied the flimsy things to my feet. The looping and knotting of the one-piece lace turned out be fairly simple but the final knot itself was not very secure. Would it hold, I wondered?  A short while later I opened the garden gate and burst upon the empty road in the setting sunlight. I felt heroic. This was going to be my running renaissance. 

The first few strides were very strange. It was a true sensory overload. I could feel everything in my feet and I felt distinctly closer to mother earth. Every sense of mine was heightened; my sight, my sense of smell and my hearing were all enhanced. I was much closer to the world around me. And I got even closer when my newly crafted huaraches disintegrated about five minutes into their inaugural outing. I looked down to see what had happened. The pathetic car mats had torn like pieces of old newspaper and were flapping like freshly caught fish. It was pointless. I gathered up the debris and walked home barefoot trying to look as though I always walked around half naked. I felt so undressed.

This was not going to be as easy as it seemed and perhaps because of this I became increasingly resolute that if I was going to run in footwear, I was going to make that damn footwear myself. I had read the Complete Idiots Guide and although the author, Dr Craig Richards, was promoting barefoot running in his book I was wise enough to reason that for me, barefooting was a bridge too far. I would go thin, I would go minimal but I was not ready to run around barefoot. But my immediate problem was that I had nothing minimal to run in and it was clear that the car mat concept was not up to the task. Of course I was still very far from realising that my body, and especially my feet, were light years away from the rigours of the task but naiveté is a glorious deception.

The time was December and I was on holiday. The days in Johannesburg at that time of the year are long and warm with frequent thunderstorms that turn the neighbourhoods into a shady labyrinth under the beautiful green canopy. They say Johannesburg is the worlds largest man-made forest and they are probably right, especially around where I live. The season and my relaxed mood were conducive to experimentation so the first mishap with car mats was not a significant set-back, I would simply get out there and find something better. But days turned to weeks and I wasn't really getting anywhere. 

My searches had led me to leather and I spent a lot of time trying to cut, glue and generally manhandle pieces of hide, some as thick as 6 millimetres. I had also given up on the huarache lacing system which always resulted in sandal movement on my feet. Was it the way I ran? Was it the shape of my feet? I was not sure and it didn't really matter because I was going to do something different.

The huarache sandal uses one long lace that starts underfoot between the big and first toes, and then, simply put, goes right around the foot including the heel while crossing underneath the sole twice, on either side of the ankle. It finishes back up on the top of the foot where it is finally secured to itself. Tensioning one lace that goes right around the foot and underneath the sole twice, is more than a nightmare and for me it was impossible. I accepted defeat.

After a couple of months I decided to relegate the huarache lacing system to the trash heap and I gladly embraced some features of modernity including Velcro, elastic and metal eyelets. My lacing system mimicked the huarache style, was more labour intensive to set up, but worked pretty well once everything was in place. Most importantly however, my foot stayed planted on top of the sole and didn't inch inexorably sideways.

During February, which was in retrospect my Leather Period, I and my family went away for several days to a small village in the highlands a few hundred kilometres from Johannesburg. It was Dullstroom, a well-known fly fishers haven which also happened to be the thing I was going to do a lot of while there. Not only was I going to fish as much as I could but I was going to walk around, uninterruptedly, in my newly crafted leather sandals. The soles of these sandals were made of such thick and rigid leather that I had spent hours punching small perforations in them to try and gain some flexibility. I was not sure if I would ever be able to run in these hard, inflexible, leather things but I was going to try, and getting them soft and supple was what I needed to do first. So I walked and fished and walked and fished until one day I was fishing a few kilometres from our house when a large thunderstorm broke around me. This was not the time to hang around with a nice antenna-like fishing rod attached to my body. Lightning was striking capriciously and worryingly close, while rain was pelting down in buckets. 

I set off running down the muddy single-track track, later becoming a farm road but equally submerged and sloshy. I trotted back to the house and quickly removed my precious sandals to clean them. All the little holes I had made in the soles were full of mud and small stones and I used a big abrasive brush to do some deep scouring in hot water. I brushed and scrubbed and brushed and scrubbed. And as I brushed and scrubbed I watched the leather delaminate from the rubber portion on top of the soles, the so-called footbed. My sandals fell apart, literally in my hands. I felt trapped ... what could be happening? My handiwork was coming to nought. And then I realised I was washing these sandals in hot water and the glues I had used were dissolving in the heat. My sandals were toast. The next day I put the leather pieces out to dry and later when I retrieved them I found that not only had they dried nicely, and were crisp like big cornflakes, but they had shrunk too making them useful only to a midget. I looked for the dustbin. And that marked the end of my Leather Period. It was not so much the glue problem that ended my Leather Period but the realisation that leather and water do not mix. Making a "fair weather only" sandal would not work.

Despondency set in once I returned home. My sandal exploits were pretty futile and I was miserable. I had not yet made it public, but at that point I had a booking to hike down the Fish River Canyon in Namibia a few months ahead and I was secretly harbouring the prospect of walking in self-made sandals …. now my private ambitions were in shreds. As for running, I wasn't doing much of that either. What would I wear on my feet? I really wanted to try and run in sandals but my regular visits to footwear stores left me dejected and disillusioned. Everything had a heel and most “athletic” footwear was just too big and clunky. But then a marvellous thing happened. I found an EVA foam supplier in the south of Johannesburg.

EVA foam is a synthetic rubber-type product much like that used in soles of regular running shoes. It has similar characteristics to the more widely used polyurethane soles and is also used extensively in the footwear industry. My new EVA supplier could provide me with sheets of this stuff in thicknesses varying from 3mm to 15mm. When I went to their warehouse I was like a kid let loose in a candy store. The sheets of EVA foam were stacked everywhere and I kept staring at them. There was so much of it as well as other products like 2mm rubber outersoles of various tread patterns. It made me think of the Phillips rubber we used to put on our leather soled shoes when I was young. This was exactly what I had been looking for during the past few months. I gathered as many sheets of various thickness that I could carry, and rushed home to get busy with my cutting knife. And did I cut! This was my Cut and Glue Period. I made sandals at night. I made sandals in the day. I made sandals over weekends. I made sandals while I lay in bed at night. I made sandals at the dinner table. I made sandals in my office. I didn't stop. I was incorrigible.  

Most importantly at this point I was able to make a sandal that I could actually run in. They were not very good in retrospect, but at the time I thought I was forging a new path in the evolution of footwear. With a surfeit of EVA material at my fingertips I was able to make sandals with varying sole thickness and although I was running very short distances I could choose from a range of options. I could pontificate whether it would be a 3mm day or a 5mm day or perhaps an 8mm day. My running started becoming a daily event as a new routine manifested itself. I was now running in sandals as I entered my peak Cut and Glue period.