Bones in Feet

By Ed Ayres

In my 54 years of running long-distance races, my feet and I have had a lot of adventures together. Sometimes, looking back, I feel guilty about how badly I treated them when I was young. But I didn’t know! Parents sometimes complain that when you have a baby, it doesn’t come with instructions. Neither do feet.

So, at one time or another, I’ve experienced collapsed arches, black toenails, turned ankles, heel spurs—you name it, I’ve run or limped on it. Yet, after running at least 100,000 miles so far, over everything from paved roads to shale slides to sand to rocks, my feet are still with me, still strong. How can that be?

One clue is that between them, my two feet (like yours) contain 52 bones—26 per foot. What that says to me is that in our evolution as nomadic hunter-gatherers over hundreds of thousands of years before civilization even began, the feet must have played a far more complex role in our lives than they do now. In our modern world, we spend an awful lot of our time (except when hiking or running!) in buildings with flat, smooth floors, with our feet encased in rigid, boat-like containers.

When we walk in street shoes or boots, on flat floors or paved outdoor surfaces, our feet have little to do other than be lifted up and put down by the legs. There’s a little push off the forefoot allowed by a slight flexibility in the otherwise stiff outsole, but that’s about it. If you watch someone walk with a cane or crutches, you see the point: all that’s needed to move that person slowly along, at the bottom of the cane or crutch, is a rigid knob. There are no moving parts.

In the wild, it’s a very different story. The hominid hunters who were our ancestors spent much of their time moving about on highly variable ground (rocks, sand, turf, mud, leaves, logs, tall grass), with varying slopes (up, down, lateral, down and lateral). Often the hunter had to go long distances at a slow pace, and sometimes he had to sprint for his life. He had no shoes. To keep him upright, balanced, and able to move confidently under all those conditions, the feet had to be highly complex and sophisticated pieces of machinery. Selective adaptation built that machinery over hundreds of thousands of years.

Those 26 bones, along with 33 joints and over a hundred ligaments, tendons, and muscles in each foot, are that machinery. They are like the skeletons of an amazing, prehistoric creature of astonishing athletic capability. Leonardo da Vinci, who was no slouch as an artist but was also a remarkably prescient engineer (he envisioned airplanes four centuries before we could actually build them), said that “the human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.” If you treat your feet well, they can perform amazing feats for you—feats that the poor dogs being carried around in most street shoes can only dream of.

Next time: How to Make Feet Resilient and Strong

You can read more about Ed and his extraordinary running life at his blog: endurance and sustainability and please feel free to interact with him!