Impact: Mobility and Modernity Reconsidered

“Why do people wear shoes?” is the deceptively straightforward question animating "Impact." A film seemingly about barefoot running, as it develops it becomes an exploration of modernity’s relationship to technology, evolution, nature, our bodies, our selves, and the human spirit.

Teage O’Connor is the one who poses that question. He aspires to qualify for the 2020 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon—the race from which three Americans will be selected to run at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo—and the film follows him on that quest, along the way exploring the science, history, and lore of barefoot running. Teage trains and races almost exclusively without shoes and in “minimalist” footwear that is the antithesis of the rigid, controlling, cushioned, heavy sneakers the world is used to.

Why run in no shoes—or virtually no shoes—as Teage does? Barefoot-minimalist advocates insist the billion-dollar running shoe industry has employed slick marketing and shady science to convince the world that feet need protecting, and they find in its success a metaphor for what ails us. In "Impact" scientists, medical professionals, and runners debate shoes’ necessity. Their stances subtly become stand-ins for modernity’s technological determinism over and against an assertion that modern life runs in the opposite direction from personal health and communal well-being.

Are our feet—and our bodies more generally—broken, or are we simply not using them as designed? Anthropologists, podiatrists, and running researchers wrestle with that question in "Impact." One side insists that we break them by wearing shoes, as we must do, and only more sophisticated shoes, orthotics, and similar cures can fix them. The other, embracing the “mismatch theory of evolution,” decries the notion that something as essential as bipedalism was “designed to hurt.”

Tying it all together is Teage’s quest to land a spot in the Marathon Trial race. We join him as he runs barefooted in the bitter Vermont winter, struggles with injury, battles soul-crushing heat (and goofy interviewers) at his hometown race, attempts to best the world record for the fastest 100 kilometers ever run barefooted, and runs races from coast to coast.

In Teage we find a fierce competitor with an expansive intellect. He is our thoughtful guide not only to barefoot running but to our place in the world, arguing in the opening that we may never come around to the necessity of running in simpler shoes—and, implicitly, living saner lives—until a generational shift takes place, so seductive are modernity’s delusions.