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> The human foot is beautifully engineered to be used for long distance running, to help absorb the impact and transfer the force into our Achilles and larger glute muscles.

The foot is terribly engineered and suffers from injuries.

Human bones are frail; you have only 25% of the bone density of a gorilla or chimp. Hence the stress fractures.

The big, protruding heel of the human foot is completely counterproductive for running. It helps us stand on two legs and walk. Humans have to consciously learn a proper technique for running to avoid misusing the heel. Doing "what comes naturally" is just horrible.

By contrast, an animal doesn't have to study running technique. A cheetah doesn't have to think "Gee, I'm doing this wrong according to some pages I Googled; I should change my form so that my center of gravity is rather such and such, and my footstrike is altered in such and such a way."

We can't even stand up when we are born and have to learn how to walk, which usually takes place more than a whopping year after birth.

The sheer thickness of the meat and fat on the lower leg of a human tells you that we have evolved away from running. Running requires a stick-like lower appendage, with all the muscle higher up.

As a minimalist runner, this comment seems all wrong to me.

If we grew up barefoot or wearing huaraches, we wouldn't have to "learn" how to forefoot strike. Thick-soled shoes mess up our running instincts.

> Running requires a stick-like lower appendage, with all the muscle higher up.

It's different with bipeds, yeah? Lots of shock-absorbing magic has to happen in the lower leg.

Ostriches are bipeds, too.

They're also much lighter.

Much lighter than what?

Google "ostrich weight" immediately comes up with a "250 pounds" factoid result. A Wikipedia result just below that quotes cached text stating that they range from 63 to 143 kilograms.

Why not just say sandals instead of huaraches? I know what the word means but I suspect a lot don't. The word is really neither here nor there.

I was using the term to refer to a very thin-soled sandal. I might be using it incorrectly. "Sandal" to me evokes a 2-inch thick chunk of plastic with giant velcro straps.

>The big, protruding heel of the human foot is completely counterproductive for running. It helps us stand on two legs and walk. Humans have to consciously learn a proper technique for running to avoid misusing the heel. Doing "what comes naturally" is just horrible.

"Doing what comes naturally" after being trained and conditioned from childhood to ambulate in shoes is a far cry from what actually comes naturally.

People do wear thin soled footwear, and go barefoot indoors. It doesn't make a difference. Chronic wearers of flimsy sandals, in which you feel every jarring footstep and every little stone, do not have any better running instincts than anyone else.

>People do wear thin soled footwear, and go barefoot indoors.

As I discovered myself, walking barefoot is utterly different from running barefoot, and no amount of walking around barefoot will teach you to run barefoot, if you are used to putting on shoes to run. And the 'thin soled footwear' people show me when they try to explain that they already 'run practically barefoot' is almost always too inflexible. I use $16 water deck shoes, myself.

It took six weeks of daily practice for me to learn to run properly barefoot - the process is very counterintuitive, after a lifetime of running in shoes. There are conditioning problems too: halfway through, I could neither walk normally nor 'barefoot' without some pain, because I didn't have the muscles to run barefoot properly - landing on the ball of my feet and pushing off with my heel (many people think that barefoot running is just 'running on your toes'. Do that and you will have a bad time).

Now that I have learnt to run barefoot, the other method feels difficult and unnaturally jarring, as it did, before I could run barefoot style.

The big, protruding heel of the human foot is completely counterproductive for running.

The heel does not protrude when running.

Humans have to consciously learn a proper technique for running to avoid misusing the heel. Doing "what comes naturally" is just horrible.

Children, when running, do not land on their heels. Heel-landing is a learned development caused by heel-heavy shoes. Children land on the front/middle of their feet.

By contrast, an animal doesn't have to study running technique. A cheetah doesn't have to think "Gee, I'm doing this wrong according to some pages I Googled; I should change my form so that my center of gravity is rather such and such, and my footstrike is altered in such and such a way."

Cheetahs do have to think about how to run. Have you ever seen cheetah cubs?

I should change my form so that my center of gravity is rather such and such, and my footstrike is altered in such and such a way."

Try running without shoes. You'll learn very quickly, without google, not to land on your heels. It's the same way that animals like cheetahs learn to run-by doing.

The sheer thickness of the meat and fat on the lower leg of a human tells you that we have evolved away from running. Running requires a stick-like lower appendage, with all the muscle higher up.

Every claim in that paragraph is wrong.

> Children, when running, do not land on their heels.

You must have never lived in a wood frame building, below a family with kids.

What an odd statement.

Have you ever lived in a place where children routinely travel on the ground, barefoot? This would be a useful scenario to bring to the table here.

Kids trapped in an attic... not so much.

I've never seen any children anywhere, that didn't create the impression that 400 pound, hooved animals are thundering by.

I admit that I haven't been to the Highlands though, where True Scotsmen's children can be observed.

Ironically, living in a small house with hardwood flooring applied to car-decking (t&g 2x8 subfloor, atop 4x8 girders 4'oc -- loud AF), my kids naturally began to avoid striking their heel after a year or two. The sound transmission through flooring here is unusually bad though. But we never allowed shoes indoors anyway.

Cheetah goes barefoot from day 0. Chimps and gorillas do physical exercise from day 0.

Resistance exercise can make your bones at least 50% more dense and, given that single hip can withstand one metric ton of load, makes your bones more than adequate.

If you go barefoot from day 0, you'd learn proper run technique from day 0. Or, if you have massive body like me, you have to learn proper run technique to just run. And you, just like me, will do that in one day.

Having our posture to be very different from other animals, we have to have different muscle groups trained (thick meat). For example, the more upright position of animal, the more thick gluteus maximus is - for horse it is very small, for chimp it can be seen as just small and it is very thick for humans. So, as upright walking humans, we have to have different legs from all other animals. And different running technique.

"In this compelling clip, we see a tribesman runner pursue his prey through the most harsh conditions in a gruelling eight hour chase" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o

High altitude trekking in mountains is even better than long distance running, at least in terms of breathing and sweating.)

The crucial difference is in variety of breathing patterns on a trail - it changes with a terrain, in contrast to steady breath while running on a flat surface.

I do both - moderate distance running (10-15km) and up to 6000m trekking as a guide.

http://karma-engineering.com/

actually high altitude might be damaging the brain quite a bit, albeit 6000m is not really that bad (but it depends on person)

Nepal's most popular trekking trails, which are below 5600m, are passable even for grandmas.

Above 6,000 meters (that's nearly 20,000 feet) you're mountaineering, not trekking.

"High altitude" depending on whom you ask is generally taken to mean anything over 2,000-3,000 meters.

there is no clear definition, but for most mountaineering starts when you need technical equipment (crampons, ice axe etc). I do hikes in alps in non-winter almost every weekend in 2000m-3000m band and its pure hiking.

There are peaks higher than 6000m where you will not need this (ie in andes, tibet), and there are much lower peaks where you can't do anything without it.

One example I did - you can do Kilimanjaro without touching any snow or ice, via standard route, and that's 5895m high.

I've always gone with the concept that mountaineering starts where a rope is needed to prevent serious injury in case of a fall. Altitude or even protection is outside of the equation. A sidewalk, if beside a 100-foot drop, counts as mountaineering because the rope is needed.

Even better, The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Pr Daniel Lieberman of Harvard. An invaluable resource.

There's a bit of naturalist fallacy there. Evolution optimizes for rates of success far below what we desire for comfortable living today. For instance, if 70% of humans were made for hunting and long distance running, that is an evolutionary success- we wouldn't go extinct and the trait, when inheritable may be selected for. But in modern life, if 1000 people take up long distance running, we cannot tolerate 300 suffering from debilitating injuries. Let's start with pre-running apes, assume ability to run results in k% rate of survival over inability to run and assuming these features are heritable, after N generations humans should all be organisms perfected for running. Both k and N should be high for all humans to be perfectly suited for running barefoot today without risk of injury. It will be nice to hear an expert on human evolution chime in here.

The question also remains, can we extrapolate something that gave us evolutionary advantage to help us individually.

That is interesting, but the rats in this study don't have as well engineered feet as humans and don't sweat either.

I mostly agree with this theory. But I would argue that this model applies to humans before we migrated out of Africa. Certain human races have dramatically higher athletic performance while others have lower performance. Take the Olympic performance in track and field between Jamaicans and the Chinese.

You will note that despite a targeted program designed to win as many gold medals as possible China did incredibly poorly in track. I would argue that this is evidence for the fact that while the human foot may be vestige designed for long distance running, other factors such as cardiovascular endurance and physical strength have already begun evolving away from this design. The change is so recent that I believe the degree of this divergence depends on your race.

> beautifully engineered

> designed

Evolution does not work this way. It does not engineer or design. If you are an atheist you cannot coherently say there is a design for anything in the human body. I think the language used here is important, especially when used as the basis for an argument of what activities or exercises we ought to do.

Unless he isn't an atheist? Plenty of theists can hold to evolutionary views or intelligent design.

Further, the language choice could be colloquial in which case he wasn't trying to make a theological statement; rather, op used common phrases to convey the relevant thought. not sure we need to push a worldview here...

I didn't assume they were an atheist. The language choice was used to confer normative value to long-distance running. This isn't pushing a worldview, it's pointing out that the basis for this argument for long-distance running is something which is not coherent with many readers' beliefs.

Would "adapted" be a better word in your opinion?

evolved

And a body of water does not "want" to flow to a local minima, but personification is a damn useful rhetorical device anyway.

I'm of the opinion that rhetoric which imbues evolution with purpose damages understanding far beyond your water example. It is common to see people cite evolution in moral claims, for example: "we evolved to eat meat". I'm not interested here in the question of whether or not eating meat is moral, I'm pointing out this is a bad form of argument which is encouraged by lazy language use when dealing with evolution.

I didn't downvote but I wouldn't be so sure either. Design as a figure of speach can mean a lot and, baring the discussion about determination and free will, creating and making can feel very passive. Intent is often open ended.

I downvoted because it's tiring and pedantic to raise the objection every time someone says "designed for" in the context of biology. Yeah, we get it: evolution has no designer. It doesn't matter, because the semantic space is well understood. The figure of speech "designed for X" just means it's narrowly optimal at X -- it's good at X at the expense of being bad at not X.

Hence explanations like, "A cat's digestive system is designed for meat: it has enzymes Q and Z which are really good at breaking down flesh but also react poorly to plant matter." We get the point. We don't need a reminder that, "well, the scientific consensus is that the cat digestive system arose without an intelligent designer".

That's a very good definition of "designed" that I hadn't seen before.

Thanks. I didn't mean to suggest it was a documented definition, so much as "the characteristic that makes it 'feel' like a human-designed thing" and makes us want to refer to it that way, even when knowing it wasn't.

It's standard to refer to the outcomes of evolution as having been designed by evolution, with no one assuming that requires a "designer". Perhaps it's just easier to say than "emergent design", but it also communicates more about how evolution actually works via this metaphor. The system as a whole designs complex solutions to problems, without self awareness, that's the amazing discovery.

For what it's worth the entire field is fine with this language and no one takes it assume any superstitious beliefs.

things can be beautifully engineered and designed by a process called natural selection.

when the word design or engineered is employed it does not always mean designed by a God.