The Long Run — Friday 29 May 2026
In 2019 I listened to Tony Riddle on a podcast and decided humans were meant to run barefoot. So my barefoot journey begun. The next day I ran five kilometres on a synthetic track in nothing but skin. Came home with blisters the size of fifty-cent pieces. Long story for another post but I ended up buying a pair of Vivobarefoot Primus Lites and signed up for a marathon. You can guess how that ended. I was lucky I didn’t destroy my feet completely.
The mistake wasn't enthusiasm. It was treating barefoot running like a switch you flip rather than a thing you build.
Most transition advice you'll read online tries to fix this by giving you a number. Six weeks. Three months. Six months. Pick one. The number is reassuring because it lets you plan, lets you tell yourself "I just have to get through this and then I'm a barefoot runner." But the number is also the problem. It's why people who follow the timeline still end up injured, and why people who ignore it sometimes do fine.
The thing that determines whether your transition works isn't how long you take. It's whether you're paying attention to the right signals.
A foot that's spent twenty years inside a Kayano or a Brooks Adrenaline or any other stack-height stability shoe is, structurally, a foot that's been on holiday. The intrinsic muscles have atrophied. The arch has stopped working as a spring. The toes have lost their grip. You can be aerobically fit enough to run a marathon and still have feet that aren't ready for ten kilometres of anything barefoot. The fitness isn't the issue. The hardware is.
Rebuilding the hardware takes as long as it takes. For some people that's six weeks. For others it's six months. The variable isn't discipline or genetics — it's how long the feet have been switched off and how aggressively you're trying to switch them back on. Both matter. Neither shows up on a calendar.
So what do you actually do?
Start by wearing the shoes before you run in them. Around the house. Walking to the shops. Standing at work. This phase isn't preparation for the real training — it is the training. Your foot needs to relearn how to be a foot, and that happens at walking speeds, not running ones. Skip this and everything downstream gets harder.
When you do start running, run on hard surfaces and run short. This sounds counterintuitive and it isn't. Pavement gives you feedback. Grass and trail let you get away with sloppy landing because the surface forgives you. Concrete won't. Short distances let you collect that feedback without overloading tissue that's still adapting. One kilometre is plenty. So is half a kilometre. The distance matters less than the awareness.
Form-wise, you'll know it's working when running feels quieter. Not lighter, not faster — quieter. The slap of a heel strike disappears and is replaced by something closer to a soft tap under the midfoot. You don't need to think about it. Let the shoe teach you.
Then watch for three signals, and let them set your pace rather than the other way around. Top-of-foot pain means you're landing too far forward. Calf knots that don't release overnight mean you've added volume too fast. Plantar fascia tenderness on waking — that distinctive first-step pain — means you're overloading the foot before it's adapted. Each one is information. None of them mean you've failed. They mean back off, give it a few extra days, and try again at a slightly lower dose.
This is the bit that separates people who make the transition stick from people who don't. It's not the protocol. It's the willingness to back off when the signals say back off, and to keep moving when they don't. Most injuries in barefoot transition come from one specific cognitive move: deciding the calendar matters more than the feet.
A note on the shoe itself, since this is a barefoot newsletter. Construction matters more than most beginners realise. A well-made barefoot shoe — flat, consistent sole, foot-shaped last, durable outsole — will give you cleaner feedback than a cheap one pretending to be the same thing. Your foot is learning from whatever the shoe lets it feel. Cheap construction teaches cheap form.
The temptation, always, is to rush. To prove something to yourself or to the people who told you barefoot was a fad. Don't. The runners I've watched make this transition successfully aren't the ones with the most discipline or the most natural form. They're the ones who treated their feet like the rest of an athlete's body — something you train slowly, listen to constantly, and never assume you've finished building.
If you're somewhere in your own transition and something hurts, that's information. Reply and tell me what you're feeling. I read every email.
Run light.
Lachlan.