The Five-Fingered Virtues of Minimalism

I made the switch to Vibram FiveFingers and minimalist running footwear after pulling a hamstring last spring, and since making the change, I’ve had the longest stretch of injury-free running I’ve ever had. It was a relatively mild hamstring pull — something not terribly uncommon in runners — but still kept me off the pole vault runway for nearly two months. The worst part about the whole fiasco, aside from not being able to jump, was that no one was really able to tell me what caused it. After looking for ways to make my life of running and jumping somewhat more healthy, I eventually found myself thinking that maybe less really could be more.

What I found was that running injuries may not be an inherent risk associated with the activity, and may be more directly caused by the way we run. Research from Harvard’s Skeletal Biology Lab has supported the growing concern that modern running shoes, with thick cushioning and motion control technologies that allow us to run with a heel strike, have caused us to stray away from the way our bodies have evolved to run — on the middle or ball of the foot. Their findings illustrate that the legs are subjected to impact forces of up to three times the weight of the body upon heel strike, the same forces that commonly give rise to shin splints and stress fractures. Running with a forefoot strike, as is often used while running barefoot, results in experienced impact forces seven times less intense than what the legs are subjected to while heel striking because it utilizes the body’s natural shock-absorption systems of the foot arches and lower legs. Looking to Kenyan distance runners as exemplary, the Harvard researchers concluded that we don’t need a lot of shoe to stay healthy runners; that excess of shoe underneath us may be the cause of the problems.

The take-away here shouldn’t really be running-related (important note: it took me almost four months to transition to a barefoot running style; muscles and tendons need LOTS of time to adjust for the change). If anything, the study should prompt a reevaluation of how much we think we need. For the past 30 years, running companies have been telling us that we need more shoe, but the Harvard Lab’s research points to the contrary. In precisely the same way, the consumer culture we know and love maintains with an almost religious fervor that we never really have enough. There’s always another reason to go out and buy — and retailers would like to have us believe that the best means of maximizing utility is to work long hours to more stuff and support the economy, because that seventh storage unit sure won’t fill itself. But is more really better?

Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, of the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School, respectively, say no. Their research done on the intersection on wealth and happiness shows that greater material consumption seldom leads to increases in happiness. Researchers at Princeton have found that up until about $75,000, the average mood reported by American households did increase as income went up, but no trends were found beyond that point. Dunn and Norton also point out that research has shown that people in other countries all over the world gain greater satisfaction spending money on others than they do spending on themselves.

Rethinking how much we need to be happy could have serious implications on not just consumption, but the health of our communities and strength of our interpersonal bonds. If we’re less concerned with what extra we need to have, then we can expend more energy on what others need. If we use less energy personally, then what we have will go that much further before we hit some kind of crisis. The capacity to use more in no way predicates a necessity to use more. Nature has always managed to find its way getting along without excess.

In the aftermath of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, The Sunday that Missed Out on the Naming Love and Cyber Monday, take a moment to ponder at what point it became acceptable to waste hours of our lives waiting in line to spend our livelihoods on things that probably won’t make us any better off. More often than not, less will probably feel better — I was convinced the first time I felt trail and Earth between my toes and underneath my soles.