Chris Brannigan is the legs of Hope for Hasti … if there’s a physical challenge to be undertaken to raise awareness for the charity or to generate income, Chris will likely be the one doing it. ​

An officer in the British Army since 2007 and a leader of teams big and small throughout his career.  But in the only team that counts, he is best known for his silly jokes, his love of books and getting lost on car journeys.

Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Chris Brannigan about walking barefoot for charity.

Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:

– How walking barefoot makes it easier to tell if you’re walking incorrectly.

– Why wearing military boots all the time can weaken your feet and leg muscles.

– How the soles of shoes and having a heel can negatively affect the way you walk.

– How people can use barefoot walking as a way to receive support for their charity.

– How many people buy their footwear based on fashion when it could be bad for their feet.

Connect with Chris:

Guest Contact Info
Twitter
@brannigan001

Instagram
@hopeforhasti

Facebook
facebook.com/HopeforHasti

Links Mentioned:
hopeforhasti.org

Connect with Steven:

Website

Xeroshoes.com

Twitter
@XeroShoes

Instagram
@xeroshoes

Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes

 

Episode Transcript

Steven Sashen:

If you ask a soldier what his or her most important piece of gear, or kit depending on where you’re from, is they will tell you it’s your boots. You need boots. If you’re going to take a long walk or a hike or even a run, you need a good, strong, supportive, stiff, thick sole pair of boots that are going to give you the protection that you need. What if that is the exact opposite of what you really need to do any of those activities and many, many more? Well, we’re going to hear about that on today’s episode of The MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, starting feet first because those things are your foundation.

We break down the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the outright lies you’ve been hearing about what it takes to walk or run or play or do yoga or CrossFit, whatever it is you like to do, and to do it enjoyably, efficiently, effectively. Did I mention enjoyably? I know I did. It’s a trick question because, look, if you’re not having fun, do something different until you are because you’re not going to keep it up if you’re not enjoying it. So I’m Steven Sashen, CEO of xeroshoes.com, your host of The MOVEMENT Movement podcast. And, FYI, we call it that because we at Xero Shoes and with the podcast are creating a movement which involves you, I’ll tell you why or how in a second, it’s free, it doesn’t take any effort, creating a movement about natural movement, helping people rediscover that using your body the way it was made is the better, obvious, healthier choice, just the way we currently think of natural food.

So, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes, all the different ways you can interact with us. You don’t have to do anything to join, just share and like and give a thumbs-up and spread the word and subscribe. I mean, you know the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. So let us jump in with our guest, Chris Brannigan. Please say hi to the human beings and tell people who you are and what interesting thing you have recently done recently.

Chris Brannigan:

Thanks, Steven. So my name’s Chris, as you’ve heard. I’m a soldier in the British Army, and I very recently just walked 1000 miles barefoot from Maine down to North Carolina. It took me about 45 days of walking, so I think on average about 22 miles a day. I did that to raise funds for a not-for-profit that my wife and I run called Hope for Hasti because we’re funding research and creating a gene therapy for my daughter’s rare disease, which is called Cornelia de Lange Syndrome or CdLS for short.

Steven Sashen:

I want to hear about both of those. Let’s start with the barefoot part. So as we started by saying, boots are the most important piece of gear for a soldier. Clearly, that was not the case when you were walking barefoot. How did you decide to kick off your kicks, as it were, and make the switch to barefoot? I mean, this sounds like a crazy thing to the average human being. What crazy thing went through your mind to make this occur?

Chris Brannigan:

Well, actually, what you said is the truth. So my wife and I, two years ago almost, so in January of 2020, decided to start this charity because we wanted to create this therapy and fundraise. Of course, we went straight into COVID-19 and lockdown and we thought, “This is terrible,” because we’d raised some money but nowhere near the kind of money we needed. We had already got bills coming in from labs and scientists. So we thought, “We’ve got to be able to do something big, huge to capture people’s imagination as soon as we get out of lockdown.” We wanted to do a long walk.

There’s a really famous walk in the United Kingdom called Land’s End to John o’ Groats, which goes diagonally across the UK. I said, “I could do that,” and my wife said, “No, people do that for fun. They do it in stages or they cycle it. That’s not going to work.” I said, “Maybe I’ll wear a kit. I’ll wear all my military kit. That’ll be attention-grabbing.” She says, “Oh, it’s good, but it’s not… I don’t know if people will really be grabbed. They won’t know what you’re doing.” I think in a moment, a Jerry Maguire-esque moment of insanity, I said, “Maybe I’ll do a barefoot. I’ll take my boots off.” She said, “There’s no way anybody could do that. It’s just not possible.” So that led to my first barefoot walk, which was last year. It was a moment of lunacy. Before that, walking barefoot was something I did on the beach only when playing with the kids.

Steven Sashen:

So, it literally just popped into your brain that way as just an extreme thing to do. There was no history of barefoot whatever. It just showed up as, “This is the craziest thing I can think of.”

Chris Brannigan:

Exactly. That’s how it started.

Steven Sashen:

Well, ironically, that’s kind of how Xero Shoes started as well. I had this idea. I was making sandals for people and someone said, “Hey, if you had a website, I could put you in a book that I’m writing.” So I rush home and I pitch this incredible opportunity to my wife who says, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Don’t do it. It’s a waste of time and money.” I said, “Yeah, you’re probably right.” So I waited till she went to bed, and then I built a website. So it seems you and I have this thing in common of just defying our wives.

Chris Brannigan:

Yeah, yeah. Much to her consternation. But we were really lucky in that going barefoot really did grab people’s attention. So I started walking in this place called Land’s End, which is miles away from anywhere in the United Kingdom, down in the southwestern corner. As soon as I set off, people were looking. They’re like, “Why has that guy got no shoes on,” and they’d say, “Do you need shoes? Are you okay?” I’d say, “I’m walking barefoot to Edinburgh, which is where I wanted to finish 700 miles away. They couldn’t get it. They had no words, and they would sort of look at my feet and then look at me and… Yeah, it had the attention of really grabbing their attention. It was amazing.

Steven Sashen:

Isn’t it fascinating how when you’re walking barefoot, you can see that people are noticing that you have no shoes on from a significant distance? I’m amazed at how much it grabs people’s attention when it really shouldn’t. But it does. I’m in Colorado and I’m barefoot a lot, and I’m in stores barefoot a lot. I see people noticing from way on the other side of the store, and same thing. It’s like, “What are you doing?” My response, I say, “If we were at the beach, would you ask me that question,” and they go, “No.” I go, Well, then just pretend we’re at the beach.” It’s fun. It’s comfortable. But I imagine you did not have a bunch of barefoot walking, running, hiking, whatever experience before you set off. So what was it like? I mean, what was the transition, if you will, like despite the fact that your transition was cold turkey, let’s just jump in?

Chris Brannigan:

It was really, really hard. That 700 miles, it took me 35 days and was easily the most difficult and painful thing I’ve ever done in my life, if I’m honest. So I started preparing maybe six weeks in advance, going from boots, as you said, with an inch and a half of rubber underneath your foot and a lot of support on your ankle, to wearing a lot of weight. I was carrying about 55 pounds on my back because I was camping out to keep costs down. I was carrying all my food and water. Yeah, and the thing I did when I was walking barefoot, I trained, really, and I say trained. That’s a very grand word. I walked barefoot with my kids. We’d just go round the block and do a mile or two miles, and then suddenly I was doing 25 miles in one shot. I cut both my toes within the first mile because I wasn’t lifting my feet high enough off the ground. So I dragged my toes and tore a flap of skin off. That was painful. I got lots of blisters. Within about four or five days, they all burst.

Steven Sashen:

This is a diagnostic thing. Where were the blisters, ball of your foot or tips of your toes?

Chris Brannigan:

Balls of my feet.

Steven Sashen:

Interesting. And so do you have an understanding of why that was happening?

Chris Brannigan:

No. I was really trying to figure out how to walk again. I was used to walking in boots. I was sometimes shuffling a bit faster than a walk, slower than a run. Normally, I would run the heel to forefoot and move off, and I found I couldn’t really do that, so it was a lot of time on the balls of my feet. I think just because of the weight and the fact that my skin and my body wasn’t prepared and the distance every day and no time for recovery, the wear and terror was cumulative, unfortunately

Steven Sashen:

I’m going to suggest that it might have been something a little different. If you have video from those early days, it would be fun to see because typically, blisters, there’s two things that are going to cause it. One is extreme heat, like sudden heat. We all know that you put your hand on something, it’ll blister. But the other one, especially for running or walking barefoot, is just friction, excessive, horizontal force. If you go from heel striking, where when you’re doing that, you’re usually landing with your heel further in front of your body and then decide just to land on the ball of your foot, many people incorrectly just point their toes a little bit. So now you’re getting that breaking force on the ball of your foot instead of getting your foot underneath you.

I imagine, though, that… Because I have a blister story as well from my first barefoot run. I was over-striding, pointing my toes a little because I’m a sprinter. You’re supposed to land on your toes. But my left foot was putting on the brakes every time I landed on the ball of my foot and ended up with that giant gaping hole in the bottom. What did you notice about how that changed over time and how your gait changed over time? Because you were putting yourself… I would obviously never recommend someone go as extreme as you do right away. But when you’re putting yourself in that situation, your brain and your body are going, “I’ve got to figure this out,” I imagine.

Chris Brannigan:

Yeah. And that’s what happens. So for the first two weeks, my feet just got worse and worse, and the blisters burst, I got infections and had to take antibiotics. It was pretty bad because you’re barefoot on the ground. You couldn’t avoid dirt and whatever else. So I had a two-day break and kept my feet off the ground, just relaxed and was looked after for two days. Then I got back on the road. I was still moving quite fast, but I found my feet started to get used to it. So they were becoming stronger as I was heading north towards Edinburgh. The blisters were still there and they were having to heal on the move, which was less than ideal. But, yeah, I think over time my body adjusted really well, and I felt stronger and stronger every day.

Steven Sashen:

Yeah. That’s the other thing. Again, the research shows… Crazily enough, we have to do research to show this idea, use it or lose it. If you’ve been in boots all that time, especially military boots, your feet can get weaker the same way you put your arm in a cast, it doesn’t come out magically stronger eight weeks later. But it’s amazing how quickly we can build intrinsic foot muscle strength. A doctor at BYU, Sarah Ridge, she showed that an eight-week period was more than enough to give incredible changes to foot strength, whether you’re just walking in a minimalist shoe, like Xero Shoes, she didn’t use ours in the study but said ours would give the same results, or barefoot or doing an actual foot exercise program. So it’s not surprising to hear that you just experienced that, but you were just… Boy, what’s the word I’m looking for? I can’t think of it. There’s a phrase that involves fire, throwing something into the fire. What the hell?

Chris Brannigan:

Yeah. It was like a trial by fire, I suppose. Yeah.

Steven Sashen:

Yes. That was the phrase I couldn’t find. And what was happening in your mind during that process? I mean, just to deal with that, those first couple weeks in particular, how did you pull that off mentally?

Chris Brannigan:

It was hard. It was really difficult. On the occasions where I was on my own and I was in pain and I knew I had to get to some far-flung town maybe 20 miles away-

Steven Sashen:

Oh, man.

Chris Brannigan:

… I was really struggling mentally. When you get lost, as sometimes I did because I wasn’t paying attention, and you’re adding extra miles on, then I’m getting cross with myself, there were times when I just thought, “I need to just stop doing this.” But I was really fortunate that lots of people came to join me and they walked with me and that really helped a lot, one, because they could read maps better than me but also because you’re talking and you’re busy and I was thinking less about what my legs and my feet were doing and more about just the people around me and that really helped. But it’s interesting, the whole military thing. For me, I started in the Army 14 years ago, and within three months of starting, I hurt my knee, and I had lots of knee problems for years, right up until I started that barefoot walk.

Before I started, I bought two knee supports because I thought… I knew myself. I know anything over eight miles and my knees really start to suffer. They start to become like a rusty hinge. It’s hard to move them and totally open out that joint. I was really worried. I thought that before everything will take me out of the game. Interestingly, I had no knee problems. 25 miles a day, every day for over a month, and I wore my knee support preemptively for the first few days. Then I thought, “This isn’t hurting me, I’ll take it off,” and still nothing happened. That was just because I was out of boots, I think, no heel. You have a big heel on a boot and lots of ankle support and it changes the way you walk, and I thought, “This is actually very odd, it’s a great surprise that my knees are in such good shape,” because I thought they were done for.

Steven Sashen:

There’s a researcher in Brazil named Isabel Sacco who put minimalist shoes on the feet of elderly women, 65 years plus, who had knee osteoarthritis, not just a reported knee pain, but x-rays showed they had osteoarthritis. After six months just walking around all day, every day in minimal shoes, gone. What happens is it’s upside down. People think that you need cushioning to protect your knee. I was actually talking to Isabel about this just a couple weeks ago. When you have a bunch of cushioning, it spreads out the pressure of landing on the ground, especially if you’re landing incorrectly, and you have pressure sensors basically in your feet, and so they’re getting less information, but the force is still coming through. So you don’t feel it in your feet, but the force is going through your body, and if you’re landing on your heel in particular with your knee relatively straight, it’s going right up through your joints, and it hits the knee first and then your hip your back afterwards.

So, I asked her about the elderly women. She goes, “Yeah, they just got stronger by using their legs and more correctly using their muscles, ligaments, and tendons, and that protected the joints, and they weren’t putting force into the joints, and then things just healed.” So we hear things like that all the time. We can’t medical claims, but it makes sense naturally if you’re using your muscles, ligaments, and tendons to support your joints. It’s like if you step off a small ledge, you don’t land with a straight leg and just deal with the force. You land on the ball of your foot, your arch actually works, your legs bend, your knees bend, your hips bend. You protect yourself naturally, and that’s what happens if you start running or walking correctly as well. People don’t realize they’re even making the change most times because it’s so slow. But, for you, it was really acute because you were just dealing with it every day for hours and hours and hours. Dude, hold on.

Chris Brannigan:

Yeah, and-

Steven Sashen:

Wait. I got to ask. Is that a personality thing, that you would just dive into something blind like that and just grit your teeth into what works?

Chris Brannigan:

Yeah. And, again, when we set up the charity, it was exactly the same. My wife and I had been on this little journey of discovery where we were thinking this should be something we could do more than the doctors are telling us. Because they said, “There’s nothing you could do. Just go home. Sort it out.” Learn to live with it was the phrase they used. Our daughter has lots of medical issues and educational issues as a result of her condition, et cetera, and we just kept learning and reading and reading and speaking to different people.

We were in contact with some world leaders in this research science community who are working on gene therapies for other conditions, and they said, “You could do it. It costs huge sums of money. It’ll take a lot of time to get a great team behind you, but you could create a gene therapy for your daughter’s condition.” On a whim, we just said, “We’re going to do it. There’s no way we can now continue to live knowing that there’s something we could do for our daughter and not do it.” We set up a GoFundMe page, and, slowly, the charity came to life. Two years on now, here we are. We’ve got a great scientific team. We’ve created the gene therapy. We’re just testing it now. So I think, yeah, that’s personality-driven.

Steven Sashen:

Well, I’m going to come back to the charity and the gene therapy things in a bit, but I have a few more questions about your endeavor, both in the UK and the US. So were you doing anything? What were you doing to promote it? I mean, the people who ended up walking with you, how were they finding you, and what was their experience when they were with you?

Chris Brannigan:

So, I think people find it really inspirational. It’s hard for me to say that because I didn’t find myself inspirational. I always thought of myself as a dad who’s doing just what he needed to, the only thing he could, really, to help his daughter. But they could see I was… It would be difficult to walk 20 plus miles a day carrying 55 pounds of kit with shoes on, but when you’re on the road… And, in the States, it’s not really set up for pedestrians, so sometimes I’m walking on Route One. It’s really fast. It’s really noisy. There’s a lot of grit that’s been thrown off the road onto the shoulder where I was walking. It was very uncomfortable all day long. I think people found it really inspirational, and that’s what we were hoping for. We were hoping that people would just see the lengths that someone will go to help their child.

Steven Sashen:

Again, were you doing anything to contact news people, radio, TV in advance? Were you just waiting till you got somewhere? Were you expecting it to be just kind of organic? I mean, literally, I’m trying to imagine if you had been walking by here, how I would’ve heard about it. Needless to say, I would’ve joined you in a heartbeat had you been walking anywhere near Denver. But I’m just curious how one organizes that to make it really work.

Chris Brannigan:

We’re a really small team. The charity is my wife and I, and we both have normal jobs, so we’re doing this part-time, evenings and weekends, with a bit more effort during a challenge like this. But my wife behind the scenes in the United Kingdom was calling news media across Connecticut, New Hampshire, wherever I was about a week in advance to try and tell them, “This is what’s happening, Chris is coming through, he’s going to be here at these times,” and try and get paper coverage, on the web, radio, et cetera. I mean, we had some really good hits. We had The New York Post. We had People Magazine’s website, not People Magazine itself. We got some really good TV coverage, both in the UK and the US. So we were lucky that people responded really well.

Steven Sashen:

When they came out, were there people who then took off their shoes and walked barefoot with you?

Chris Brannigan:

So, when I walked in the UK last year, I had two people who walked barefoot with me for a full day, and that was really good for me.

Steven Sashen:

Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Chris Brannigan:

Because I could see they were discovering it at the same time as I was discovering it, you know? That helped me feel a bit better about myself. When I was in the States, I had people who joined me for a little bit barefoot but very short distances, half a mile max. But what we did, actually, after I walked in the UK, we had a relay. So we invited people to take part in a relay the retraced the same route using my daughter Hasti’s favorite teddy bear’s button. People walked somewhere between three and seven miles barefoot, and that was amazing to watch. People really got behind it.

Steven Sashen:

Oh, that’s a great idea. I love that one. There’s a guy… I don’t know if there’s any value in you guys hooking up, but there’s a guy here, actually, literally down the street, who has an organization called joy.org, and they help remove women from sexual slavery but not just by getting them out, by tearing down the entire infrastructure that got them in to begin with. He realized that a lot of the places he was working were places where everyone’s running around in bare feet because they couldn’t afford shoes. So, for the last probably 10 years, maybe more, he’s been doing the same, just walking around in bare feet. He has a great card that he gives people when they ask why he’s doing this to show that it’s about solidarity for helping get women out of sexual slavery.

So, there’s now two people that I know, you and him, his name’s Jeff, who are using barefoot walking as a way of getting attention to support something. God, there’s got to be something that we can do. And he puts on a barefoot… What do they call it? It’s not a barefoot run, but it’s a one mile something, and you can either run it or walk it barefoot or do whatever, but it’s just to get attention. But we got to do something to get more and more people doing this and then hook you all up in some way. I think that would be a riot.

Chris Brannigan:

I think it’d be great. I’m a real advocate now of barefoot running. As painful as it is to do all that distance and time and weight as intensely as I did it, as I think any endurance event is inevitably going to be, since then, I’m a convert. One of the things I noticed that was really interesting was when I was preparing to come to the States, I was trying to prepare a bit better than I did last time, so I gave myself a bit more time. I walked barefoot, I ran barefoot. I was running with my wife one day, and I realized how noisy she was when she ran, just crunch, crunch, crunch on wherever we were going because her foot was hitting the ground so hard. But when I was running, I was almost silent because you place your foot down almost gently, and it’s so much kinder to your foot and your leg.

Steven Sashen:

There are people who report going for barefoot trail runs and sneaking up on deer because the deer don’t hear them coming.

Chris Brannigan:

Really?

Steven Sashen:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s a really fun one.

Chris Brannigan:

Wow.

Steven Sashen:

Yeah. It is entertaining. I used to live on this cul-de-sac, and there was a guy running in those big, thick, maximalist shoes that are supposed to provide all this cushioning. I could hear him from a block away, just like bam, bam, bam, bam. We have not lived there for a year now. I have no idea what’s going on with him now, but I can’t imagine that his knees or hips or back are not having problems because of all that force. It just doesn’t make sense.

Chris Brannigan:

I’m in the Army, as I said, and it’s an organization that is full of people… My evidence is anecdotal, but I feel like I know a lot of people who’ve had knee surgery.

Steven Sashen:

Your evidence is anecdotal, but I can tell you this. We have, I don’t know, 50,000 reviews from people who say things that are similar to what you say. I will never say that anecdotes equal data, but when you have a preponderance of anecdotal information, there’s a value to that. When it’s spontaneous, when it’s not prompted, there’s something worth looking at there, and there’s research being done that backs it up, Sarah Ridge about walking, Katrina Protopapas about putting arch support in shoes and how that weakens feet, Isabel Sacco with the elderly women. Isabel actually did research just showing people in regular shoes, if they just do a foot strengthening program, their injury rate over the course of a year is two and a half times less than for runners who didn’t do it. So she just wanted to start there. Then you combine that with the research about walking in minimalist shoes. It just seems screamingly obvious that if you… I say it always. It’s not about the footwear, it’s about the form. It’s just certain footwear makes it easier or harder to have form that will be beneficial.

Chris Brannigan:

I agree 100%. It’s interesting. You’ve obviously studied this over a very long time, and I’ve sort of learned all the lessons in a really stupid, hard way.

Steven Sashen:

Well, look, it’s not that I studied it over a long period of time. I threw myself into it as well. I mean, I had the experience of being injured all the time as a sprinter, going barefoot, my injuries going away, becoming faster, becoming Masters All-American, and then starting this company, and just same idea. I mean, it was just trial by fire, now that I have the phrase in my mind. In fact, there’s a funny version of that. One day, Lena, my wife and co-founder, was kind of upset. She’s saying, “I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.” I said, “No one knows what we’re doing, and pretty much no one knows what they’re doing either, if they were honest, when you’re starting something new.” So our job isn’t to know it all and learn it all first. It’s to figure out what we need to learn every day to keep going and move things forward. You just had a crash course. You just did the speed-reading version of that.

Chris Brannigan:

Yep. That’s how I feel. But it’s been really positive for me, not only physically, I feel… It’s funny. I couldn’t move very fast and I’m carrying a lot of weight and I was stopping all the time to talk to people when I was out on the road because people came to see me and wish me well and give a donation, so my days were really long. One of the things I missed was running. So when I came back and I was able to just get out and run unencumbered for five miles or six miles, it was so amazing. I used to be a person who ran and was watching my split pace and my timings. I started to dread running because I was making a job out of it, and then I discovered, actually, I just love to be outside in nature and see the ducks and the trees. For me, it’s sort of rekindled my love with running.

Steven Sashen:

I say that you can always spot a barefoot runner from 100 yards away because they’re smiling. They’re doing it and looking for how to make it feel good while they’re doing it instead of looking for just how to get done or zone out or anything like that. So I imagine people would walk up and say things like, “You can’t do that,” as you’re doing it or being supportive, which would be the opposite of that. But did you see… I’m trying to think of how to ask this question. Are there people who argued with you about the… Here we go. People were saying… They’re seeing you doing it, but I’m sure a number of people said, “Yeah, that’s you, but I couldn’t do that.” I mean, what are the kind of arguments that you heard from people, and were there any people who were changed either in real time or that you heard about from encountering you and seeing that whatever they were saying or thinking was patently false because here’s you as the evidence?

Chris Brannigan:

I think almost universally, I can only think of two examples to the contrary, but people just said, “I couldn’t do that.” People, I think, thought, “I’m going to try this out,” and lots of people would message me, like closer friends would say, “I just tried to walk to the end of the yard to put the trash out in my bare feet just to see how it was,” and they say, “Oh, it’s horrible. How are you doing more than two miles or whatever you’re doing every day? How can you do 20? I can’t get to the end of the street and back.”

But I know some people who’ve been away, and, actually, I saw someone in your shoes a few months ago, and I thought, “Those are cool, where did you get them,” and he was telling me all about your shoes randomly. So to be contacted by you is really interesting. I work for an organization where people are essentially professional athletes. You have to be physically fit all the time in case you got to go somewhere. They don’t think of themselves as professional athletes, but it’s a job to be physically fit. I feel like this is a piece of the puzzle that we’re missing. So many people have injuries that relate to bad footwear.

Steven Sashen:

Totally. Well, Dr. Irene Davis at Harvard has been trying to get various grants to work with the military to demonstrate that there’s a way of reducing injuries and improving performance by getting out of those shoes that they’re typically wearing. She’s often run into obstacles because the military seems to have contracted with big shoe companies who are very much opposed to finding out that their shoes don’t work, even though there’s actually been research that has demonstrated that. Here’s one. Pardon me for dumping research on you. I hope you find it useful. There’s this whole idea that there’s different kinds of gait and feet, so either you need a neutral shoe or a motion control shoe or stability shoe or whatever the hell they are, I don’t even remember the three categories, and that they can analyze you and figure out which shoe is right for you.

So, the military put this to the test. They took some large number of people, divided that group in half. One group was analyzed and it’s like, “Okay, you’re getting the appropriate shoe based on this analysis.” The other group, they all got the same shoe. The difference in injury rates between the people who were prescribed the right shoe and the ones who got a random shoe, the difference in the injury rate was zero, exact same injury rate, and significant injury rate, too. The people who designed the, “Here’s the way to analyze you and put you in the right shoe,” they know this and they’re still promoting that whole idea and people believe it because they don’t know the research and they don’t care, frankly, about the data. You can’t convince people who have a belief by showing them data that proves the belief is inaccurate. They just hold onto it more tightly. It’s the way human brains work, sadly.

But, yeah, and there’s a doctor here in West Virginia named Mark Cucuzzella who’s a former Air Force doctor, and he’s a practicing physician. He owns a footwear store that only sells minimalist footwear called Two Rivers Treads. He’s still active in the military in some way. I don’t remember exactly what he does. But he also has been working very hard to, a., train people how to run properly, even if they’re in crappy footwear, but also get them out of crappy footwear. I don’t know what it’s like for the British military, but it’s just shocking how something that can demonstrably be helpful, they’re unwilling to even test it.

Chris Brannigan:

I can’t imagine that it costs a lot to test something like that if you consider the size of most national defense budgets.

Steven Sashen:

Oh, no. The biggest thing is it just takes time because if you want to do the study well, you definitely want to take six months to a year just to see the longer term impact and see… There’s one guy that I know who he lives in a very closed community with a couple hundred people, and many of them switched, almost all of them switched to minimalist footwear, and they’re on factory floors all day, 12 hours a day on concrete. When they switched, he said, “The number of injuries of the lower body that I started treating went down to almost zero.” But there was three or four people who tried the minimalist footwear and didn’t like it.

But what he then reported later was after they kept seeing the benefits that other people were having, they decided to try it again six months later and then they switched and became converts. Now, the entire community is nothing but minimalist footwear because they just… And that’s the thing that we fundamentally need, is enough visibility, whether it’s barefoot or minimalist, so that people get over the, “Hey, isn’t that weird,” and just start seeing people having positive experiences until they go, “All right, maybe I should try that.” It’s not just the crazy people like you and me and the couple million other people who’ve done this. It needs to get to… I don’t know what the number is, but we need to hit a certain critical mass.

Chris Brannigan:

Absolutely. I feel like people aren’t really talking about it a lot. People are buying footwear based on design and aesthetics, what looks nice, and mostly what looks nice is what’s usual for the eye.

Steven Sashen:

Correct.

Chris Brannigan:

And that means a pointy shoe or something, usually, that’s fairly unhelpful.

Steven Sashen:

Well, and that’s a really interesting point as well. It’s like if we’re not used to it, then that tends to keep us away. There’s a whole marketing principle about that. If you make something dramatic enough, it becomes polarizing, and there’s some people who will love it and some people who will hate it. Then if you’re able to stick around long enough, the people who hated it get used to it and they don’t hate it as much. Then maybe a few of those come to the other side, and then you can tone it down a little bit, and it becomes more acceptable across the board. So there’s a possibility there. But, anyway, we can do that. Let’s dive into charity things. So I want to start from the beginning again. Can you tell me the name of this condition that your daughter has?

Chris Brannigan:

The condition is called Cornelia de Lange Syndrome. It’s a genetic condition, so it’s not inherited from Hasti’s mom or myself. It was a de novo mutation, meaning it was just totally random. For kids, in most severe cases, it means some kids are missing some of their fingers or their forearm hasn’t formed properly or their forearms. It can mean learning disabilities, cognitive disabilities and seizures, feeding problems, cardiac issues. What’s scary for us is Hasti’s 10 next month and, from puberty, we know there’s a downturn in kids who have CdLS. So they develop self-harming behaviors. They get anxiety disorders. They can become selectively mute. So it’s really frightening.

Steven Sashen:

Wow. And obviously a very rare disease. I mean, disease isn’t really even the right word since it’s a genetic error, if you will. So roughly how many people are affected by this?

Chris Brannigan:

So, they reckon it affects about one in every 20,000 births, so that’s thousands of people in the United States and hundreds in the United Kingdom. But there are so many rare diseases that you just never hear of them all.

Steven Sashen:

And it’s interesting, what you described. That’s a lot of, I don’t want to use the word symptoms, a lot of effects that seem completely unrelated to each other. Since you’ve been doing and having scientists do the work on the genetic aspect of this, what have they found genetically? What are the snips they’ve found? What are they seeing that’s causing these seemingly very disparate effects?

Chris Brannigan:

So, it’s interesting, and I don’t understand that science very well. We came at it from a different angle, my wife and I, because there was some research going on in this space already and scientists were trying to get after answering those questions. What is the mechanism of a fault in this gene that results in ABCDEF, all of these symptoms? We said, “We actually don’t care about the science, we don’t care how it gets from a faulty gene and the mechanisms to get there,” because we knew gene therapy could help deliver a working copy of the gene to the cells in the body. Working copy equals all of that middle bit, as complex and intractable as it may be, will start to sort itself out and those symptoms will lessen. That’s what we’ve been getting after. It’s interesting to understand the science, but we’re after treatments for kids like our daughter.

Steven Sashen:

I’m also interested just in that first bit. I don’t care about the middle bit as much, but what is the sequence that you need to replace? Because, again, it just seems such an odd combination of effects to be coming from a single area in a single chromosome, if that’s what’s going on.

Chris Brannigan:

Yep, it’s a single gene. So in Hasti’s case… In fact, in CdLS, there are seven genes that contribute to the conditions. So a child could have a faulty HDAC8 gene or an NIPBL gene. These are all different genes, but they all result in the same clinical outcomes, more or less, with degrees of severity. But the way gene therapy works, so it’s really interesting, is they take a benign virus called an adeno-associated virus or an AAV9, which does what viruses do when they get into the body. It propagates itself as widely as it possibly can, but it has no adverse effect in itself, really. But it’s loaded with a working copy of the gene.

In Hasti’s case, it’s called an HDAC8 gene, H-D-A-C-8, and it drops off a good copy in every cell that it visits, meaning that that cell now has the instructions that it should have had from the outset to do whatever it needs to do in coding proteins or enzymes, et cetera. Then you start to see a lessening in symptoms and improvement in condition. And, hopefully, if you can get it into kids early enough… Hasti’s nearly 10, but kids are born with this condition all the time, and our hope is that rather than sitting in front of a geneticist and they say, “There’s nothing that can be done,” people will be told, “There’s a therapy, and we can get you lined up for that straight away, and it’ll improve their lives.”

Steven Sashen:

And so, you said you’re in the testing phase now?

Chris Brannigan:

Yeah. So we’ve created the gene therapy. We’ve manufactured it. We’re working in partnership with a great laboratory called Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor in Maine, and they’re world leaders in disease modeling. So they are testing it right now, and to get FDA approval, you need to show two things, efficacy, so you can show that it works, it has positive effect, and safety, so we’re doing that testing right now.

Steven Sashen:

How far along are you? When do you think the results will be in from the testing?

Chris Brannigan:

So, we really started to develop the vectors and do all that work, I think, in March or April last year. Then we’ve been developing these disease models, et cetera, with the Jackson Laboratory. So that work is due to start imminently, probably after Christmas.

Steven Sashen:

Oh, wow.

Chris Brannigan:

And depending on how it goes, we would expect to see at least preliminary results within three months.

Steven Sashen:

Yeah. I can imagine that being simultaneously exciting and nerve-wracking.

Chris Brannigan:

It is for a number of reasons. One is the amount of money we have to raise. We’re trying to raise two and a half million pounds, which is about three and a half million dollars, and-

Steven Sashen:

And where are you…

Chris Brannigan:

… we’ve raised about one and a half million dollars, so we’re about 35% to target. We’re about a third of the way there. But our worry has always been that we create a gene therapy, we show that it works in the lab, but we don’t have enough money to run a clinical trial. That happens. We create these incredible treatments, medicines, therapies, and then they get shelved because pharmaceutical companies don’t want to fund it because it’s a small patient population. It’s not profitable. Governments won’t fund it for the same reason. Because the population is so small, it’s easy to ignore those people, and they get marginalized. Families can’t fund it because although two and a half million pounds is a paltry sum of money for the British government or a pharmaceutical company, it’s huge for a family like ours.

Steven Sashen:

Yeah. And I imagine that just dealing with the effects of this condition could be costly as well. So it’s not like the families who are dealing with it will have a ton of disposable income to help-

Chris Brannigan:

Exactly.

Steven Sashen:

… pool their money and make it work. So you’re working with the FDA. There are obviously other governing medical bodies in the EU, in Europe and other countries, where… I don’t know what the situation is with what the testing protocols are, what the requirements are. Are you doing anything with those?

Chris Brannigan:

So, all of the work’s happening in the United States at the moment because that’s where the expertise is. The greatest minds in gene therapy and disease modeling, et cetera, are all in the United States. So we’ve always said we’ll do whatever it takes to make this a success, and that’s why we’ve got the research happening there. If we get it authorized for use and we have clinical trials in the States, we’ll travel to do those there. But, in truth, I think if something’s approved for use in the States, then it’s easier to translate that over to the UK and Europe, et cetera.

Steven Sashen:

Yeah. I mean, I’m thinking of a number of things that are approved in Europe and Germany in particular that here it’s like, “No, we’re not going to touch that one.” I’m not saying whether they’re efficacious or not, but I know that getting a yes from some one place doesn’t mean you’re going to get a yes from some other place. So what’s next in terms of trying to… Other than things like this, and I appreciate you being here, and I hope that being here is somehow helpful, and we’ll tell people in a moment how they can chime in and contribute. But what’s next in terms of getting the word out to try and raise more of those funds or bring more awareness to what you’re doing?

Chris Brannigan:

So, we’re always trying to raise awareness, and we have a number of different social media platforms, which have been really helpful. I feel it’s such a godsend to live in an era where you can click send on a message and hit thousands or millions of people’s inboxes. No more challenges planned right now, but the truth of the situation is that we have so much money to raise, as I’ve said, so this journey will continue. Probably when we get to spring and summer next year, we’ll have more things going on in the UK, maybe internationally. I don’t know. But we’re always willing to have people help us and get involved in the journey. You can fundraise from anywhere, which is the good thing. So if people want to help, that’s super.

Steven Sashen:

I’ll have to keep you posted. I have an idea that I want to do that does two things simultaneously. One is help people discover the value of natural movement, in this case with Xero Shoes, but also to, at the same time, collect money to support some local charity or some charity that we are connected to in some way. So we’re still in the middle. I’m being a little vague because there’s some very cool things that are part of this that I don’t want to reveal so that someone can’t do the same thing and beat me to the punch. But some really fun things that we could do where it’s designed to go around place to place to place, and it’s such an odd thing that it’ll get attention and we can… What we are doing on our end of getting people to have the experience of barefoot slash minimalist footwear is the key thing that will wake people up to then contribute in some way.

So, we’re really looking forward to seeing what we can do to be helpful for anyone who’s trying to do something meaningful and especially if they have a connection to the natural movement world, even more so. So I will be keeping you posted. Hopefully, again, by spring maybe we’ll be ready to go and have some fun doing that. But, in the meantime then, why don’t you tell people how they can find you, find out more and be helpful? Because I imagine there will be many people listening to this who will be inspired to do so.

Chris Brannigan:

So, if people want to find out more about the charity and what we’re doing and about my journey in the UK and the US, they just need to Google Hope for Hasti, H-A-S-T-I. Hasti’s my daughter’s name. You’ll find our Facebook page. Our Instagram is out there as well. You can watch all that stuff. If you can make a donation, that’s amazing, but even just liking and sharing posts is a great help as well.

Steven Sashen:

Yeah, we’ll definitely do that. Well, dude, it’s been such a pleasure. I mean, I’m really glad we hooked up, Chris. I don’t even remember how it happened, frankly, but suffice it to say, again, just to reemphasize, we’re not suggesting that people do the same thing you did of just take off your shoes and go walking on streets for 20 plus miles a day for days and days and days. But it is really interesting to hear what happens when someone really does put themself in that unimaginable position, and you’ve come out the other end where we expect people to get, but we hope they do it with a little more finesse.

Chris Brannigan:

Yeah, I’m totally lacking in finesse.

Steven Sashen:

Well, you and I have that in common as well. So, once again, thanks so much, Chris. And for everyone else, please go check out Hope for Hasti and let us know what your experience is and reach out to Chris in whatever way you can think of. Again, feel free to go over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find ways you can interact with this podcast and all the previous episodes, all the places you can find us, YouTube and Twitter and Instagram, et cetera. If you have any questions or recommendations for people who should be on the show or if you just want to tell me I have a case of cranial rectal reorientation syndrome, I’m open to that as well. Basically, if you want to get a message to me, just drop me an email move, M-O-V-E, @jointhemovementmovement.com. And, of course, if you want some super comfy lightweight footwear, boots, shoes, and sandals for casual and performance use, then check out xeroshoes.com. But more importantly, just go out, have fun, and live life feet first.

 

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