The Long Run June 12 2026
No single thing did more for barefoot running than Christopher McDougall's Born to Run. And nothing did more damage.
Both at once. The people who love that book only ever want to talk about the first half.
It landed in 2009 and it's a cracking read: the Tarahumara running impossible distances through the Copper Canyons in sandals cut from old tyres, ageless and uninjured, while the rest of us fall apart in three hundred dollars of engineered foam. The villain is the modern running shoe. The hero is the human foot, left alone to do what it evolved to do.
And on the big idea, the book is right. Your feet are more capable than the shoe industry needs you to believe. Thirty years in cushioned, supportive trainers really can leave a foot weak and lazy. Form matters.
The thesis was never the problem. What people did with it was.
Plenty of them read a 280-page adventure story and treated it as a training plan. Binned the trainers on the Sunday, ran their usual ten kilometres in FiveFingers on the Monday, and spent the next six weeks limping, because a calf and a foot splinted by shoes for thirty years don't rebuild over a weekend, however good the book.
It was never trying to be a manual, so there's no chapter on the months of dull, patient adaptation the change actually takes. Why would there be? Dull doesn't sell adventure books.
Vibram settled a class action in 2012 over health claims it couldn't back up. The boom crested, then collapsed, and the industry, smelling a fad, backed away and went back to selling foam. One overcorrection answering another.
Here's my confession. Part of why I stayed sceptical so long was the converts this book minted — the ones who'd read it once and then lectured the whole running club about heel strike. The book didn't just persuade people. It convinced them they'd arrived when they'd barely laced up.
That's the real damage. Not that it was wrong — that it was persuasive enough to make the slow part feel optional.
Read it anyway. Read it for the fire, because nothing else written about running has as much of it. Just don't let a love story write your training plan.
The feet in that book took a lifetime to build. Yours will too.
What did Born to Run do for you — start you off, or put you off? Hit reply, I read every one.
Run light,
Lachlan