Nike Free; The Beginning of Barefoot Running

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The History, Philosophy and Ethics of Design.

9 min readJun 13, 2020

When I was presented with this project my first thought was that I wanted to talk about something close to my identity. When thinking of my identity as a person always one of the first five things I think of is my identity as a track and field athlete, specifically a distance runner. I’ve been running for sport and for leisure for almost 10 years now and it has become part of my daily life. Something I was introduced to only a few years ago was barefoot running. My coach would have us often do short strides on the infield barefoot because of the potential strength benefits you gain in your feet, ankle, and lower leg. This was a completely new layer to my training that I had never experienced or even thought of including in the past. That was when it clicked I thought this would be a great time to talk about the Nike Free running shoe and its impact on the barefoot running community. What makes the Nike Free so important to me is its connection to the Stanford Track and Field program. Stanford and Nike have had an incredibly close relationship for many years and this connection has impacted not only Nike, but the whole running community as a whole. The Nike Free specifically, was inspired by Stanford athletes who would run barefoot on the university’s golf course sometimes during practice. (See Footnote 1). The incredible part of this is, Stanford Track and Field still does this. Those same barefoot strides that I was told to do by my coach a few years ago, served as the inspiration for the iconic Nike Free.

The Nike Free was originally designed in 2004 by Tobie Hatfield and Eric Avar. Tobie Hatfield joined Nike in 1990 after Nike asked him, “to join their team and combine his athletic knowledge and transfer those skills into making shoes engineered and built to the exact specifications of championship athletes” (See Footnote 2). It wasn’t until 1997 that Nike promoted him to Senior Engineer of Advanced Projects. Some of Hatfields greatest design achievements include: designing the ‘gold shoe’ used by Michale Johnson to win two gold medals and again in the Sydney Olympics win two more. Hatfield has also designed shoes for Maria Sharapova, Troy Polamalu, Stacy Dragila, and Suzy Hamilton (See Footnote 2). Eric Avar boasts a similar connection to Nike as he joined in 1991. Avar is the Vice President of Design Innovation at Nike. During his time at Nike he, “…has helped create some of Nike’s most innovative and award-winning designs of the past 20 years, including products within the Nike Basketball, Nike Free, Lunar and Kobe Bryant series of footwear”(See Footnote 3). These two have had an incredible impact on Nike footwear, not confined to one particular sport. It is no surprise that these two together were able to design and produce the innovative Nike Free.

What is it though that made the Nike Free so different and what caused it to make so many waves in the running community? It circles back around to the debate on barefoot running. There is a lot of speculation around running and running performance related to shoes. This is due to a combination of running at a very competitive level as well as running as a hobby. On the competitive side, shoes are the ultimate summary of running equipment. If you have a pair of shoes you can be a runner. However, just like any other sport, when athletes are pushing themselves to their ultimate limit day in and day out for milliseconds of improvement, the same begins to happen with equipment and training. That is why Nike was so fascinated with the Stanford athletes running barefoot and why they went on to conduct studies and create the first shoe meant to promote ‘the natural running form,’ the running form your body naturally adapts to while running barefoot. They believed, and went on to show in their studies, that barefoot running helped athletes improve not only their lower leg strength, but also their form.

It is not only professional athletes that strive for this. Everyone who runs; whether they are doing it to get in shape, because they chose running as their sport in school, or just for fun; runners will often struggle with injuries because of the repeated impact and toll that running takes on the body. This often get amplified in people who have less experience with running. Even hobby joggers search for ways to get the same returns from running without having to deal with the inevitable next day soreness and pain that they experience. Both professional runners and hobby joggers have the same motivation to wonder about barefoot running. Are there benefits to running barefoot, are these benefits real or just situational, should I start running barefoot?

Should I start running barefoot?

That is the debate that has been circling the running community for over a decade now. Yes, a large part of this debate comes from Nike’s introduction of the Nike Free because at the time of its release in 2004, Nike had already solidified itself in the sports world as a major player. However, there was another big wave that hit the shoes vs no shoes debate, Christopher McDougal’s book Born to Run. In an article posted by the Smithsonian Magazine, editor Meghan Gambino discusses her experience with the shoes vs no shoes debate along with her understanding of McDougal’s book. Written in 2010, this article was at a point where barefoot running was not an overwhelmingly known idea in the running world, as Gambino put it, “…barefoot running, though clearly not the norm, is becoming more common. (Or nearly-barefoot running is, at least)” (See Footnot 4). The key here was the last note that Gambino added, nearly-barefoot running. Although Gambino does not site the Nike Free as the nearly-barefoot shoe, the one she does name, the Vibram FiveFingers released in 2004, the same year as the Nike Free. This was the beginning of what Tobie Hatfeild called the, “…natural motion silo…” (See Footnote 5). A silo, in this case, is a section or type of shoe that sporting goods stores would stock, natural motion being shoes meant to be super close to barefoot running without exposing the sole of the foot to rocks, gravel, or anything else that can be found in a person’s path while running.

This was the incredible thing that McDougal meant to show the world in Born to Run. “In his bestselling book Born to Run, McDougall writes about the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico’s Copper Canyon who run extraordinary distances (we’re talking up to hundreds of miles) in simple sandals without experiencing the injuries that plague most runners. He uses the Tarahumara to prove that, as humans, we are built for this type of running. Running barefoot, people have a more upright body position and shorter strides, landing first on the middle or ball of the foot, rather than the heel, as is often the case when wearing cushy shoes” (See Footnote 1). We often expect through the advancement of technology over time that any and everything in the present would be better than what it was in the past. Yet here we have McDougal telling us the story of a Native American tribe that would run hundreds of miles in simple sandals and current runners can’t even run moderate distances of a couple miles without dealing with constant aches and pains, even falling victim to muscle strains and stress fractures.

But what is really happening when you run barefoot? What really do you gain from it? In her article Gambino references a couple specific studies conducted on running in shoes vs barefoot running. One specifically found, “…a 36 to 54 percent increase in knee and hip torques in runners wearing shoes versus those who did not” (See Footnote 1). An increase in torques on your knee and hip joints are twists and strains that can only be harmful and in a sport of very repetitive motion. Repeating strides with these strains are what lead to injuries in runners. There is also the correction in running form discussed by McDougal. When running barefoot you are prompted to run more towards the middle and ball of your foot instead of heel-striking. Heel-striking is well known in the running community as a bad habit. By landing on your heel, you are only amplifying the torque and strain on your legs. On top of this, heel-striking acts as a braking force, you lose a lot of your momentum when landing on your heel so you need to consume more energy to travel the same distance as someone not heel striking (See Footnote 6). An article written on Breaking Muscle (See Footnote 7) they go in-depth on what the benefits of barefoot running really are. One important thing to understand is that barefoot running does not bring an increase in VO2, the amount of oxygen that can be consumed during intense exercise. Changing your shoes does not change your athletic ability, it is to help you better utilize that athletic ability in the best way you can. However, this article did review a different study where athletes spent 4 minutes running at a set speed on a treadmill and, “It was concluded that when performed on a sufficient number of steps, barefoot running leads to a reduction of impact peak in order to reduce the high mechanical stress occurring during repetitive steps” (See Footnote 7). The study found that the barefoot runners had more efficient impact times and also noticed earlier activation of calf muscles. After understanding all of this, we can see that the goal of barefoot running to fully awaken all the muscles in your legs instead of letting them go unused when running is cushy trainers.

Though there is a misconception here. The Nike Free is designed to help you gain the benefits of barefoot running, but it is not so black and white. Often times in debates we get lured into the idea that there are only two sides or two options. Tobie Hatfield elaborated on just that misconception when talking about the 2019 Nike Free release. “Not everybody uses Nike Free in a 5K competition or a 10K or a marathon. That’s not the intent. The intent is actually for it to be there as a supplement to all of our other products and silos and we think that that’s the smart way for an athlete to train” (See Footnote 5). The Nike Free was designed to allow runners a chance to capture the benefits of barefoot running, but shoes like this are not meant to replace your running shoes. It is the supplemental introduction of short walks and runs barefoot or nearly-barefoot that will get your average runner the best results. This may seem to go against what McDougal was trying to show with the Tarahamura who run hundreds of miles in sandals, but there will always be anomalies and people who are at the extremes. It is easing into the barefoot runs and adding them in slowly that will truly allow you to shine as a runner.

The Nike Free was originally designed to show off the benefits of barefoot running and allow everyone the chance to grab on to those benefits. It is not a simple craze in the running community, it is designed to impact how people approach running in general, shape the way professional athletes train, and give a hobby jogger a choice of shoe on the way out of the house that day.

Thank you,

Hariharan Sathyamurthy