Barefoot on the Beach

Marathon Bahamas weekend has come and gone, but we’ve still got running on the brain, especially during these health-minded resolution-heavy days.

Barefoot running seems like the latest craze, with Vibram FiveFingers everywhere we look, including last fall’s New York Marathon—where some skipped shoes altogether.

We checked in with our New York foot doc to see what he had to say on the matter. His take: Running shoes definitely take some of the pressure off. When we run, the impact on each foot is five to seven times our body weight, so if you weigh just 100 pounds, that’s 500 to 700 pounds of pressure in every footfall, and there are about 1,200 of them in a typical mile. Stress fracture anyone?

Upshot: we’re not ready to expose foot to pavement, but running barefoot on the beach sounds just about right, and here at The Cove, we’ve got miles and miles of wide, smooth, flat powdery sand expanses perfect for it. According to our guy in New York, running barefoot on sand relieves a lot of that pressure, especially in that mid-beach sweet spot between overly compacted wet sand and the too-powdery stuff. And the little bit of sink-in you get makes your body fire even more muscles than it would when running on pavement. Sounds like a win-win to us.

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