The marathon is a hard distance to run; it is 42 kms of hard running. It's hard on the body, in particular the feet which is the reason all marathon runners spend so much consideration to what is on their feet. Marathoners spend considerable time finding the correct shoe and plenty of money is associated with running shoes. Back at the 1960 Rome Olympics, Abebe Bikala from Ethiopia turned up for the marathon where there were no shoes left in the teams kit that would fit him, so he ran the marathon without footwear and went on to win the gold medal. This is widely acclaimed as a exceptional achievement. In recent years there has been a group of athletes that are advising the running shoes are not all they can be promoted to be and are advocating that running must be done barefoot, just like nature made us for. After all, we were not born with footwear and historical humans had to run great distances without shoes to survive as animals needed to be hunted on foot over great distances. Running shoes are really only a quite recent creation.
Runners who endorse the barefoot way of running love to point out the achievements of Abebe Bikala as even more validation that we do not need running shoes. There are certainly a great many other justifications both for and against barefoot running, with hardly any scientific evidence underpinning it. While Abebe Bikala winning gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics without running shoes undoubtedly suggest that it is possible, what those who like to promote his triumphs as evidence often leave out that he later went on to win the gold medal and break the world record in the marathon at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic games. Abebe Bikala managed to set the world record this time wearing running shoes; to put it differently he could actually run faster when he was using running shoes. We might well have evolved to run barefoot, but we also evolved in an environment prior to concrete and hard surfaces emerged. While the accomplishments of him were extraordinary, using him as evidence that it is better doesn't stack up to scrutiny.