Watching the arrival of what seem to me sensible running shoes makes me think again about the need for us to think things over and discover what works and what doesn't work. Bare feet work the best for running, I would think. I mentioned before the African runner in long ago Olympics who ran bare footed and ran like a deer. Her feet didn't appear to touch the ground. She looked like she was floating over the solid earth.
Then there were the guys carrying 200 pound loads up the volcanoes in Guatemala. They wore flip flops and had no trouble with their feet. Then along would come German hikers with million dollar equipment and spend each night tending to blisters and foot rot. Hum... Makes you think.
I never could use a running shoe with the heal higher than the toes, so I missed 40 years of Nike high design sneakers. I also noticed that all my running friends had big calves and I really liked my thin ones (even when I was a fatty). Many also had injuries. Have you seen the stories of the runners in Copper Canyon, Mexico who run for days barefoot? And fast? Or the reports of Native Americans who ran in deerskin for a thousand miles?
So now for real money you can buy some running shoes that are designed to work like bare feet and Nike and its ilk owe no "We goofed" for the millions of people they bamboozled into painful and damaging shoes.
I think it is a great time to examine everything that had been sold to us as newer and better and scientific and modern. I suspect that we will find lots of places where the more simple, more old fashioned, more natural path is also more satisfying and more wholesome. Why did anyone ever bring themselves to think that a plastic baby bottle made of God knows what in God knows where and shipped all around the globe could possibly be better than a glass one? How did anyone ever become convinced that a prepackaged, cheap milk product like substance mixed with water of dubious quality and sometimes dangerous quality could be an improvement over breast milk?
What is turning in to a real treat these days? Something like corn or tomatoes grown in your own garden and picked warm from the sun and eaten right then. To me, that is better than a $300 restaurant meal. Unless that is what the restaurant offers.
I am not at this time, wanting to homestead. I am not wanting to eat nothing but rotten potatoes like my Irish ancestors had to do, but I am for examining what we have been sold as our "needs" and our rights. Have you ever been to a bake sale and bought packaged brownies or cake thinking it was homemade? And tasted that awful after taste? I remember when cake mixes came out in the early Betty Crocker days. It was certainly a thrill that every cake you made with a package looked great. It was. But they didn't seem to have much substance. You ended up eating a much bigger piece to get the hit you used to get from a homemade cake. And a mix offers almost as much work as making the real thing.
I, of course, went in the opposite direction during the hippie years. I ground my own whole wheat flour with a hand grinder. I went to the farm to get real cream for the whipped cream frosting. I packed the cake with ground seeds and nuts. I made fifty pound birthday cakes that tasted like old bread. My son once told me that he would be so happy if we could have one of those cakes from Carvel for his birthday (an ice cream cake) because he didn't think his friends would go for the brown ones I made. He always was a diplomat.
Years later when my friend Shelly was curing her tumor with macrobiotics and she was getting sicker and thinner, her daughter and I made her a carrot cake that we swore was from a pure macrobiotic recipe. We lied. Shelly ate almost the whole cake which had pounds of carrots and walnuts in it but also a dozen eggs, a half pound of butter, a ton of maple syrup. Sometimes you just have to do the right thing.
So we have known about "backing up to better leap forward - Reculer pour mieux sauter" forever, but need to do it in a more balanced way. I don't need to bake nasty hundred pound bricks, but I also don't need to believe that a fake something is better than a real something. Also if the best runners I have ever seen are almost bare foot or bare foot, why would I believe a company that has gotten rich exploiting workers all over the world, that they are making the best product that you have to have?
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