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The reason I have so many pairs of running shoes
in my office is that, um,
years ago I got interested in in how you hold your head still when you run
and a colleague of mine [...]
VOICEOVER: Lieberman and Dennis Bramble of the University
of Utah, noting the vast number of evolutionary
adaptations that make humans extraordinary runners, came to believe that our early ancestors
used their endurance to chase down large prey, such as an antelope, until it collapsed in
the heat of the African savanna.
LIEBERMAN: I became interested in the problem of how did people run before shoes, because,
obviously modern shoes were invented very recently,
in fact in the nineteen seventies
and probably the shoe itself is actually a recent
invention, and for most of human history and
pre-history humans were either barefoot or wore very minimal shoes like moccasins or
sandals.
So we started studying barefoot runners and as a result I've gotten very interested
in
how shoes affect running so most shoes, here's a cutoff of a shoe, so most modern
shoes have really high heels
and there's lots of, and the heel's very thick it can be two or three centimeters
thick and much thicker than the front of the shoe
and so
uh... this shoe was really designed with all these elastic elements here in the heel so
that
when you land if you land on your heel it cushions
the landing
so it's very comfortable
uh... to land on your heel
but um... but if you run a more minimal shoe which is the sort of a classic minimal
shoe, this is what a racer might wear, right
uh... this shoe has no heel, you know this is what
people wore uh... regularly until very recently and so it hurts to land on your heel in a
shoe
like this so people
uh... we think before the invention of more
cushioned running shoes
uh... didn't land on their heels for the most part, they landed more on the ball of the
foot,
and that has different
physical properties so you have less exchange momentum between the body in the ground, there's
less collision when you land on the ball of foot than when you land on the heel so you
can naturally run
on very hard surfaces
barefoot or in very minimal shoes quite comfortably and that's how many of the world's very best
runners run, they, they don't land on their heel they land on the ball of their
foot and
so, as a result we've been looking at other kinds of minimal shoes like this one which
I like to wear and and racing flats etcetera I so my, uh, my life is full of,
of shoes.