I live near a plaza with lots of restaurants. It’s basically two long strips of coffee shops, boutique stores and restaurants. It’s a lovely strip. The fact that the two rows are parallel makes for a great wind funnel allowing me to sit outside while I listen to my audiobooks and drink coffee. Then the silence is broken. In the corner of my eye I see a platoon of “casual runners” all dressed up in their expensive Nike’s and branded running gear. And they want you to notice. While everyone else is enjoying an evening of carbo loaded dinner, these guys flaunt their sport bands and running gear. And the shoes. There’s a store nearby that sells running shoes. It has a machine that “measures” your feet dynamics and recommends a shoe based on a simulation. OMG, has it become that commercialized?

Well, I was surprised to see that recent studies show that despite all the running technology put in shoes, the best bet is still running barefoot. The only thing that’s stopping you is your feet not growing callouses. It’s a behavioral thing. People who run barefoot apparently land differently: they land on the middle front of their foot, decreasing shock and damage to the back of the foot, which apparently is what causes apparent damage to your legs and spine. So wearing shoes — at the very least wearing good shoes mitigates this damage, but we’ve been had.

“Our feet were made in part for running,” Lieberman says. But as he and his co-authors write in Nature: “Humans have engaged in endurance running for millions of years, but the modern running shoe was not invented until the 1970s. For most of human evolutionary history, runners were either barefoot or wore minimal footwear such as sandals or moccasins with smaller heels and little cushioning.”

No wonder taking off your shoes can feel so liberating. I was at a wedding function and everyone knew one another so one of the aunts said over the PA system, “I encourage everyone to remove their shoes tonight, it’s so liberating!” Apart from being half intoxicated, she had a point. People started removing their shoes.

So the next time you go looking for a pair of shoes, you might want to grow those callouses instead. Or, find shoes that have less “shoe” in them.