The Case for Maximalist Shoes

It was January 2022. My physical therapist examined my minimalist style running shoes after measuring my injured foot’s mobility and assessing its muscle damage.

“You’ll have to put those shoes away for awhile,” he said. “The problem is that you have torn ligaments in your foot. Your foot needs cushion right now.” I nodded obediently.

“This isn’t a case where I’m telling you that they’re bad shoes,” he emphasized. “I’m telling you that these shoes will hurt you if you wear them right now.”

He recommended a few brands of “maximalist” shoes that initially piqued little interest in me. I figured if I did my rehab exercises I could continue wearing my minimal “barefoot style” shoes. I’d show the world with my uncanny foot strength!

Physical therapy ended and I proudly continued to wear my minimalist style shoes. I figured my foot was above the assessment of the modern doctor, though I do respect my physical therapist.

And slowly, over the course of weeks, running caused my injured foot to deteriorate. With each step, the dull ache from my injury began to return. Mobility worsened. Eventually I found myself limping pretty regularly, like I did for the second half of 2021.

My physical therapist was right.

If the primary criticism of the modern cushioned running shoe is that it acts as a cast for the foot, my situation presented a strong case for needing cast.

A ligament on the bottom of my right foot was giving me particularly acute pains. That makes sense. If a muscle is torn on the bottom of your foot, it hits the ground with your body weight thousands of times each day. That probably isn’t going to feel very good for long.

So at the start of April I went to a running store and bought two pairs of cushioned running shoes. Heck, I figured, my foot was on the verge of no longer being able to run. Some cushioned shoes wouldn’t make the matter worse. Besides, it would only be temporary.

I bought a pair of Hoka Cliftons and a pair of Altra Torins because I preferred the relatively little heel raise of the shoes and the wider toe boxes. The Altra Torins are actually “zero drop,” which means they do not have an elevated heel at all.

Walking and running in cushioned shoes was an odd sensation after spending the previous few years with almost no foot support. It felt like I was constantly walking over a plush bed. I didn’t necessarily like that. We have thousands of nerve endings in our feet and I believe those nerve endings seek sensation in the earth.

And yet, within two weeks my injured foot’s various pains went away. I was running comfortably, and that was frankly a surprise. A week after that and I forgot the foot was ever injured. A week after that and I was running farther distances than I ever had in my life.

I rotate the Altras and Hokas by running session in order to prolong them. I’m still running in them (I’m supposed to until at least the fall). Maybe I’ll continue after that to an extent and just rotate in the minimalist shoes. Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Though I think there is health risk in becoming dependent on cushion (a limb trapped within a cast for years will inevitably weaken), maybe my situation was one of the few in which “maximalist” shoes served a good purpose.

I can’t argue with good health after all.

A Schism Created by Cushion

We enjoy comfort far too much. Sometimes it seems to me that for most, finding a higher degree of comfort is the meaning of life.

Maybe linked to our obsession with comfort is a fear of death. Or at the very least it could be an obsession with security. Maybe a fear of death and an obsession with security overlap to some degree.

We want the most “ergonomically comfortable” office chairs so that we can sit still for hours without our backs aching. We want the densest amounts of foam in our shoes to prevent soreness or injury. We want the most plush mattress to sink our bodies into at night when we sleep.

Indoors, I am always amazed by how Americans in particular blast their air conditioning. God forbid we form a little armpit sweat.

I often wonder how much weaker we become due to our obsession with comfort. The foam in our shoes prevents the nerve endings in our feet from feeling the ground, and over years our feet weaken. Our office chairs encourage a state of inertia in which no part of the body can form a semblance of struggle, and over time our blood stops flowing. Our beds make us soft, mentally and physically, and our backs ache more with age, requiring still plusher beds.

And all this foam, all this cushion, creates a schism between us and the world around us. As our foam technology improves, the schism widens. We become unfeeling, overly sanitized forms with casts, going through corporatized motions of how a human should behave.

And as the years pass we become pale shells of our younger selves; yet ironically, our younger selves had a more intimate connection with the world and therefore a greater understanding of eternity. Where we once embraced a little dirt and a little stench and a little ache here and there, we now obsess over eliminating all grime, all smell, and all pain from our lives. We foam at the mouths over the latest cleaning products to sanitize our homes and ourselves, and our self-induced paranoia makes us think every little exercise requires six rehab tools and a chiropractor.

We seek some sort of overly sanitized utopia in which pain is a distant memory. Death is something beyond the horizon entirely. We buy dozens of products to make life more comfortable, and then we buy a dozen more to ease the weakened body caused by the first round of products. And thus we become perfect consumers, and our purchasing cycles repeat until death.

Yet there is another option: embrace struggle rather than seek a product to ease it.