The Wall Street Journal has an article out of how many (most?) gyms get pretty upset if you try to use them barefooted. It is the usual frustrating read.
The article is At the Gym, the Shod Wish the Unshod Would Beat Feet.
On the bright side, the author interviewed quite a few folks from the barefooting community: Barefoot TJ of The Barefoot Runners Society, Ken Bob Saxton of Running Barefoot, and Jason Robillard of Barefoot Running University.
And leading off the pack is fellow barefooter Alan Adler, with a featured photo:
Alan Adler
I really wish these people would learn how to do a story on barefoot running (or anything barefoot). No, every article does not need to talk about bare “tootsies”. And we’ve seen every bad pun about keeping on our toes.
The article was respectful of going barefoot, and gave all the barefoot runners a decent chance of saying their piece. But it also suffered from the usual crap (yes, I mean crap) that folks come up with. It’s like they’re having an ignorance fair.
We’ve heard it all before, and debunked it all before.
(Hint to any future interviewees: ask the reporter what opponents are saying, and try to line up knowledgeable people who can counter that. I wrote a bit about that in We Need to Lead Reporters by the Nose, but what I wrote back them is woefully inadequate.)
First, they talk to a Hanna Brooks:
It was just a big, hairy dude with his big, hairy feet, clomping along beside me. I just felt like that was an unnecessarily excessive human skin transfer.
What does she object to, hair? Should he have shaved his arms and legs, too. And clomping? Bare feet are almost always quieter than shoes. Excessive human skin transfer? There’s probably more just naturally shedding off the rest of her body.
And of course, we hear from an owner, Jason Carrell, who probably couldn’t reason his way out of a paper bag:
If someone were to drop a weight on their toe, and they don’t have their shoe on, their toe is going to explode.
Really? And it is somehow better to drop a weight on their shoe-encased toe, turning their toe to paste? If you drop a weight on your toe, whether there is a little cloth from a shoe in the way won’t make much different.
And then they get a so-called expert (Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health), with the claim that
Barefoot runners risk getting athlete’s foot and plantar warts. Pounding on a treadmill could result in small abrasions to the foot that would make it easier for infections to spread.
Hey, doesn’t he know that fungi require the warm, moist interior of a shoe to spread? And the science doesn’t support his statement on warts, either, as I wrote about in Plantar Warts. He’s just repeating myth that he probably heard years ago.
And does he have any evidence for these “small abrasions”? I’ve never seen any (though bathing a foot in a sweat-soaked shoe sure is a good way to soften up the skin to allow in any pathogens).
I’m sorry, I just get tired of these sorts of articles that try to go for “balance” but don’t achieve it. On the other hand, I think all the barefoot runners acquited themselves well. Good statements; good rationality.
I do need to warn Alan Adler. The article ends with the following:
Others have found ways to tiptoe around gym rules. Mr. Adler tried running barefoot at the Fitness 19 in Royal Oak last month.
He deliberately chose a machine at the far end of the gym away from trainers, he says. He also wore long pants so that his bare feet would be harder to notice.
Mr. Adler succeeded in completing a half-hour workout. “I was shocked when I got away with it,” he says.
He adds, “You’ve got to be sneaky.” Once you’ve been told not to do it, he says, “you don’t stand a chance.”
Sorry, Alan. You just gave away your trick in a national newspaper. You may find that it won’t work next time because they will be keeping an extra special eye on you!
Ahcuah 
Good article, Bob – you have spoken my mind…
Great article Bob! I find it very ironic that health clubs and gyms are very slow with adopting barefoot running. They always say there is no research to support it, but never state that there isn’t any research to support running with shoes either. I also thought that the trainer that stated that “your foot will explode” was implying moreover that he didn’t want to clean up the mess. I’ve worked out for periods of time throughout 20 years and never did I ever drop a weight on my foot.
Fear, and a desire to control… these have been the foundations of segregation at least as long as there have been shoes, or people who look, act, or think differently (or more reasonably).
The gyms, fitness centers and shoe companies are welcome to make money however they wish. They will just not be making any of my money. I’ll stick to hiking, trail running, calestetics, free weights, ect.
I keep toying with the idea of joining a gym. If I do, I’ll make sure up front to check with them that I can be barefoot, and also add a clause to the contract I sign with penalties to the gym if they renege (like refunding the last 2 months’ payments).
I doubt that today’s young gym managers/owners even know that it was not that uncommon for people to work out barefoot in gyms before they were born. 35 years ago in my college gym, many of the big bodybuilder types worked out barefoot some of the time or all of the time, including dead lifts, squats, and toe raises. No one ever made a big deal of it or cared. And look at Arnold in the 1970s, he did that in golds gym in california. When gyms started becoming “upscale” in the 1980s, to attract a wider audience and charge more for some snob appeal, they began instituting appearance based dress codes, and lying about the barefoot thing as being a “liability” or “sanitation” issue to convince people to wear their new “matchy-matchy” sneakers with designer workout outfits. Ugh.