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 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.