Drop Dead Healthy

The conversations revolve around the time they saw the light. That moment they revolted against the footwear industry, and threw off their well-padded, overengineered lace-up chains. “I just said F it, and took off my shoes!” recounts a woman in red shorts. They talk about their freedom from plantar warts and aching arches.

I’m working on my feet this month because they are a huge, and often overlooked, health hazard. Americans suffer an estimated nine million foot injuries a year. And as I get older, I 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 on the front foot.”

But isn’t the foot designed to run barefoot? “That doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it,” Dr. Archer says. “We used to use dial-up modems. Should we stick with them? If you’re nearsighted, should you avoid glasses because they’re not ‘natural’?”

In fact, she suggests that I buy a foam insert for my sneakers. As McDougall said, I do land too hard on my heels.

I’ll return to Dr. Archer in a moment, but let me say this. After talking to other doctors and reading everything I could on the topic, I can confidently say: The jury’s still out on the barefoot movement. It shouldn’t be dismissed as a wackadoodle fad. It does make some logical sense. But on the other hand, it probably shouldn’t be adopted by everyone. Medicine is increasingly personal, and the feet are no exception. It’s something to try. Nowadays, I take about a quarter of my runs sans shoes.

Back in Dr. Archer’s office, I slip off my shoes and socks for my exam.

She looks at my heels, which are covered in thick, callused skin. They have cracks big enough to fit dimes, maybe nickels.

Her diagnosis: “Ouchy.”

I’m going to need to add another task to my enormous list of daily commandments: exfoliating my heels in the shower. I tell her she should have seen my feet a week ago. Julie just took me to my first pedicure as part of Project Health, and the Korean woman spent five minutes polishing my heel.

“Did you like the pedicure?” she asked.

“Not really,” I say. The whole woman-kneeling-at-your-feet dynamic made me feel too much like a viceroy of a British colony.

“You have to be careful with pedicures,” she says.

Dr. Archer lists all the horrible problems that pedicures can unleash. When you get a pedicure, she tells me, you are submerging your feet in a swamp of germs. The jets in the footbath are clogged with bits of skin from previous clients.

“People get fungus all the time from pedicures,” she says.

If I ever go again, she says, I should bring my own nail file, clippers, and buffers. In fact, Archer is releasing an antifungal treatment—it’s made from tea tree oil—that I could apply to my toes pre- and post-pedicure.

“And you should never let them cut the cuticles,” she says. “The cuticles are your body’s defense against bacteria.” I assure her, my cuticles will remain intact.

Checkup: Month 14

Weight: 157

New vocabulary words learned to keep brain in shape: 301 (Today’s: “cyanosis,” the condition of having blue skin.)

Quinoa consumed since start of project: 44 pounds

Pounds lifted on squat machine (15 reps): 360

I’m typing this update in a tiny rented basement office. To get work done, I needed a refuge from my lovable but boundary-defying children.

It’s a depressing and dank little dungeon that’s only missing the foot chains. The upside? It’s freezing. At times, I have to put on my Patagonia overcoat and type with a pair of fingerless gloves.

This is good, because being cold burns more calories. A 2009 article in the journal Obesity Reviews by a University College London professor reports that the obesity epidemic can be blamed partly on our tendency to crank up the thermostat. American bedroom temperature has crept up from 66.7 degrees in 1987 to 68 in 2005. When it’s chilly, we have to burn more fuel just to maintain our body temperature. Cold also activates something called brown fat, which is easier to burn than white fat.

Tim Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Body recommends cold therapy for weight loss. He says an ice pack on the back of the neck will help. Or if you’re a tough guy, a ten-minute ice bath. I hate that my dungeon has no treadmill desk, but at least I am shivering.

Incidentally, my arctic conditions haven’t given me a cold. Which makes sense, since even Ben Franklin pointed out more than two centuries ago that cold doesn’t cause colds.

But everyone else in my family does have a cold. Lucas, Zane, Jasper, Julie—they’re all sneezing and wheezing. I’m the only one in no need of a neti pot.

It’s no fun to be surrounded by cranky coughers, and I feel terrible, especially for Lucas, who is leaking like the maddening air conditioner on the floor above us. But there’s a small part of me that is smugly satisfied.

All this sweating, eating right, and stressing less—maybe it’s working. Maybe this is what it feels like to be healthy. Maybe my overly welcoming immune system has finally decided to get rude. It’s a historic time.