Posts Tagged ‘barefoot’

Okay, everybody. Bring it back in for a minute. We need to talk candidly about something.

For as much as many others and I promote the barefoot lifestyle and talk about how low-risk it is, a very real possibility is that we willactually get hurt because we’re not wearing protective shoes.

We can even get hurt wearing minimalist footwear when something might have protected us better. The general public believes that catastrophic injuries to bare feet are waiting in every aisle of every store and under every table of every restaurant. We know that’s not true, but injury risks still exist. It sucks.

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Mohawk Island is a small, mysterious island which lay 2km off the coast of Lake Erie.

I visited this island for the first time in 2008 after staring in wonder at the island from the shore for many years.

One beautiful, calm morning I set-sail in my old aluminium canoe in hopes to make the 2km paddle from shore to the island, which was shrouded in morning fog.

The trip down from the car to the shore was fairly simple. Hard, cool asphalt stood between myself and the steep bank. The asphalt was very rocky as it is on country roads. The stones were fairly sharp, but easy to navigate with my tough, weathered feet.

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A visit to Frosting Cave

Along the Niagara Escarpments lies dozens if not hundreds of caves. Most of these caves are small, and uncharted.

This was the first of my barefoot adventure videos. I teamed up with Jeff from Ontario Caves.com and found the entrance to the cave quite easily.

It was a cold day in the Niagara Region, I was fairly new at shooting  adventure videos. The largest challenge I had with this video was the cold.

April in Ontario, Canada can be a very challenging time for barefooters. The ground may have looked warm and dry, but it was quite cold and wet. It was sunny out, but still very cold.

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I can’t really say I am an accomplished “winter barefooter” by any account since I’m very much a summer type of guy through and through. However, living in Toronto, Canada, I must endure long and cold winters every year. And, every year, I do at least a minimum amount of barefooting outside to keep both my sanity and my feet in some sort of a decent shape for when the warmer weather comes.

We had our first significant snow fall last night and throughout the day today so I decided I had to go out for a few minutes and enjoy some of the white stuff before it gets all hard, slippery and dirty.

I took two videos with my cellphone and I thought I’d share them here – please excuse the poor lighting on the first video, since it was taken last night at about 1 am. The Sound is not the greatest either – I’m still figuring things out with this new phone.

In both cases the temperature was about -5°C with a windchill factor of about -12°C. Overall, the experience felt good; my only wish is that I could do longer barefoot outings in the winter. I guess, like anything else, I need to get used to it and build some tolerance as I go.

Here are the videos, I hope you enjoy them:

Dec. 6, 2010 – 1:30 am

Dec. 6, 2010 – 2:45 pm

Keep ‘em bare, keep ‘em happy.

Barefoot Moe

I’ve got a bone to pick with some people. When barefoot running, Vibram Fivefingers (VFF) and other minimalist shoes became so popular, the lexicon used to describe how we cover — or don’t cover — our feet became muddied. Search Twitter or read news articles about the phenomenon, and you hear people talking about “barefoot shoes” or how they are loving running “barefoot” with their VFFs.

As confusing as it is to call something barefoot when it’s obviously not, the issue gets even worse when people tell their friends, “Wearing (fill in the blank minimalist footwear) is just like being barefoot.” Those of us who subscribe to fully bare feet are often asked, “Why not just wear flip flops? Isn’t it the same?” My answer to both of those questions: “No, it’s not the same.”And let me give an example why…

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