We recently discovered what the New Balance Minimus Trail shoes looked like thanks to a video featuring champion runner Anton Krupicka talking about them and wearing them. He worked with New Balance to help them develop his dream minimalist shoe. This ended up as the NB Minimus Trail shoe.
More interesting to me though was in that video they showed some quick shots of his actual barefoot. This got me interested since you would figure if you are running hundreds of miles barefoot that your feet have got to look a lot different compared to someone like me who doesn’t run barefoot at all (I cheat wtih FiveFingers classic).
If you were curious to see what a barefoot champion runner’s feet look like then you are in for a treat. However, if you for some reason don’t like looking at feet. Then I wouldn’t look below. You’ve been warned.
Just to preface what feet can look like I thought I should mention the photos we show on our home page. On our home page we show photos of people who grew up going barefoot compared to people who didn’t. The difference is surprising.
Barefoot people’s feet looked like this:
People who wear shoes all the time had feet that looked like this:
Anton, who runs sometime 200 miles a week, has feet that look like this:
His nails look kind of crazy and his toes and foot look more naturally spread out.
The bottom of the foot is even more telling. The skin almost seems like a plastic covering. It must be what happens when you run barefoot long enough that you develop this kind of foot armor. It’s not traditionally “pretty” by normal standards, but functionally I’m sure he does cry like a baby when he runs without shoes like I do.
How do your feet look like? If you’ve been running barefoot or in FiveFinger’s have you noticed your feet changing?
I didn’t think Krupicka ran most of his mileage barefoot. He posts his logs on his blog, and usually calls out when he runs barefoot — I think a few miles here and there.
Just to set the record straight, lest someone should think he does most of his training barefoot: http://runningtimes.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=20837&PageNum=1%22Ultimately