My Old Cruel Shoes

Later that day, Carlos was overheard saying to a new customer, "Well, that's every shoe in the place. Unless, of course, you'd like to try the cruel shoes." –Steve Martin-

Once upon a time, when I was a kid, I used to ski every weekend all season long. I would ski the bumps and I hit them hard. I noticed some pain in my knees around age fourteen and by the time I turned fifteen, my knees were in horrible shape. They clicked and grinded and wiggled and hurt all while it felt like I had sand in the joints. Not the normal fifteen year old knee or the normal twenty something year old, or thirty something year old knee. Obviously, this condition came from my love of pounding moguls every Saturday with my friends.

Wait, looking back I now realize there was another event at this point in my life. At age thirteen, I started running track. I really didn’t want to run at all but my friends told me they need me on the track team so our moms could carpool when picking us up. So I ran track and I ran in my blue Adidas gym shoes.

Aren't they awesome.

I didn’t have any trouble running that first year even though I didn’t have the coolest shoes. So I begged and pleaded with my parents to buy me some new shoes so I don’t have to suffer the social embarrassment from my peers which at that time was worse than death. They caved and bought me the most popular brand at that time, Onizuka Tigers.

I had the yellow ones.

If you look at those primitive shoes, you can see they knew nothing about modern running. They were flat and had very little padding. Yet, my knees still felt fine but hey I was still young and had new knees.

Then came 8th grade track and I ran in what I thought were by far the best shoes ever. Nike Daybreaks.

I really loved these shoes.

Look at that big padded heal. How could it get any better? It’s a good thing running shoes just started padding their heals because it just so happens that particular year, (age 14), my knees started to hurt. By age fifteen, I had full blown old man knees and yet I still couldn’t buy beer. But, I couldn’t give up skiing, I loved it so much even though it was tearing my knees up.

So I continued to run track through high school and even went to the Junior Olympics for the 400 meters. I did all this with that painful grinding sand feeling in my knees. After high school I cut back on how much I skied, because of the cost and how much it was killing my knees. But to stay in shape, I kept running, not much maybe one or two miles a few days a week because it hurt too much to run more than that.

Around age thirty I decided it was time to get some decent running shoes and I forked out $115 and plunged into even more pain as I ran. Realizing Nike suckered me for the flare and flash of the new model, I bought another pair for $30. The pain reduced with these shoes but I still could not run more than three miles or thirty minutes due to all the damage I did to my knees skiing when I was younger.

Friends would ask if I could recommend good running shoes. I told them to buy what felt the most comfortable. If that was the top of the line or bottom of the line, go with the ones that felt the best. I made it clear not to fall for the salesmen’s push to go with the most state of the art model and i felt the most comfortable in the cheaper shoes.

Another decade passed and my skiing turned into one or two snowboard trips per year and my running remained at no more than three miles or thirty minutes with the last ten minutes of me hobbling back home from the pain in my knees. Walking stairs hurt, walking hurt, sitting for long period of time made them stiff and overall my running days were coming to an end from all those early years of skiing damage.

One afternoon while I took my 10 year old son for a run, I tried the best I could not to look crippled when I ran. He asked me why I ran so funny and I told him I had old man knees. While we ran around the track, I saw these two guys running barefoot in the grass on the outside of the track. These guys looked like real runners and not someone who was just trying to be “Green” while they ran. I couldn’t understand how they could do something that went against all we knew about running and exercise but it appeared they knew what they were doing.

With my curiosity up, I did a few Google searches and stumbled upon Barefoot Ken Bob. I drank in every word he wrote about why we should run barefoot. I couldn’t wait to try it, in fact that very day I ran my first barefoot mile in the grass. What I absolutely could not grasp was why my knees didn’t hurt. I knew for sure that the damage from skiing would not allow me to run without shoes but here I was running with no pain.

Hundreds of barefoot pain free miles later, I’m walking up stairs with no pain, sitting with no stiffness and apologizing to my skis for blaming them all these years for hurting my knees when it was the shoes. Those evil devil cruel shoes.