It’s just about time to get back to the barefooting thing. I spent the winter in shoes, boots, ski boots, hiking boots, etc., and now I’m feeling it’s time to start getting my feet ready for hiking in VFFs again. Since I left my full-time job, I’ve been barefoot most of the time I’m in the house, so that’s a decent start, but I still have a ton of work to do to get my feet primed.
I really don’t want a relapse of the foot problems I had last year, which kept me from hiking for a couple of months, so I’ll have to try and work this out with a minimum of error in my trials.

Wore my Vibram Fivefingers to the store this morning, to pick up the last few things we needed for Thanksgiving dinner. It struck me that it’s really hard to ignore the actual process of walking, when you can feel the ground; you experience the walk, with all of the ground-level feedback coming into your brain. It’s such a contrast to the time spent in shoes, with muffled terminals on the ends of our legs, that plod forward dumbly.

I’m firmly in the camp of “the cure for shoes isn’t more shoes”. It’s just taking a very long time, and will continue to, for the issues I have to abate, and also for the changes in stride length and pressure (oh, let’s just say “Clydesdale-like stomping” that puffy shoe marshmallows have let me get away with) to kick in.
Today just feels like I’m still far from that goal. I’ve been working on it gradually since June, but the capsulitis was a setback.
Onwards! Ouch, and onwards!

I posted my capsulitis woes to Barefoot Ted’s forum on Google yesterday, after a very kind email from Barefoot Ted, advising me to try posing my question to the group (I wanted to see if he had any workshops planned for the East Coast, or had trained any coaches who lived on this coast).

I’ve already heard some encouraging stuff back…enough, at least, to keep trying to normalize my feet via physiotherapy & minimal shoes. At the very least, I’m hearing that people with high arches aren’t just stuck with it…and from what I’ve read about other foot issues on the forum, people with flat feet aren’t stuck, either.

I’m sure podiatry is a fine thing, and helps a lot of people, but it does seem sometimes like there’s a single solution for so many foot problems: orthotics. I just don’t get how that can be right for everyone. I mean, it’s not like a broken arm, or something.

Hmmmmm.