Barefootin' in the city

Many years ago I met a man on a train, wearing something I had never seen before: Vibram Fivefingers, also know as barefoot shoes. I was immediately intrigued, and a while after our encounter I bought myself a pair. I used them for a while, but then winter came and life happened and there was an incident with a washing machine on warm cycle and suddenly years had passed without me wearing Fivefingers.

Well, not anymore! Just a few days ago, I fetched the fingery footwear from my storage and started wearing them while walking to the office in the morning and back in the evening—a half-hour walk each way. I felt my experience is worth sharing.

Shoes are nice, but …

I think we lost something when we started protecting our feet with thick soles. Case in point: How extremely good it feels when you take your shoes off after a long winter and walk barefoot in the grass. Or my favorite alternative: Walking barefoot on gravel. I get wonderful chills creeping up my back all the way up to my neck. It feels like a hundred personal foot massagers having a go at me at the same time.

… feet have feelings too

The fact that walking on grass or gravel with bare feet causes so many nice feelings makes me think that overprotecting one's feet might have some negative effects on our well-being. Now, I do not believe in foot zone therapy one bit (the theory that certain spots on your footsoles are linked to certain parts of your body), but I'm pretty sure that letting your feet walk in a way that is closer to how they're supposed to is a good thing.

Ah, one of the perks of using Vibram Fivefingers: Flowers between your toes!

Sole survival

Protecting your soles somewhat is, in general, a good idea. But there's no doubt that soles also pacify your feet quite a bit, and in extreme cases of bad shoes you end up hurting them and possibly causing trouble in other parts of your body. (An osteopath once told me about a patient that came to him with neck pain. They discovered that the problem actually lay in his feet, but propagated all through his legs, hips and spine and ended up causing pain at the bottom of his skull!)

When you first put on barefoot shoes and start walking any distance longer than a few hundred yards, there are some things you notice pretty quickly.

Your feet are totally untrained for this

You can't walk the same way in barefoot shoes as you do with regular shoes. Using the latter, you typically land hard on your heel but let the sole of your shoes take much of the impact. Doing the same with barefoot shoes creates a hard thud and a shockwave going all the way up to your head. So you spend much of the time in the beginning just trying to figure out how to walk again, and you soon realize that to maintain a comfortable gait, you'll have to employ some muscles in your soles that you haven't used properly in quite a while.

When I went to art school for a year around the new millennium, the school's physical therapist—a sweet, old woman—proclaimed that the proper way to walk was to "roll over the balls of your feet". I never quite understood what she meant until now. I've found out that if you do exactly that, for some reason you don't land as hard on the heel of the other foot. But it means that you'll have to concentrate on doing that for quite a while, until you do it automatically and until your feet gain some stamina. And it means using more muscles in your feet in a much more active way.

Maybe get a blister on your toe

… to paraphrase Dire Straits. Or in other, less common blister locations. The Vibram Fivefingers aren't exactly silky smooth on the inside, and especially the joining of the soles and the top fabric is a bit lumpy in some places, especially on the shoes' insides. But nothing that a few pieces of preventive taping can't alleviate.

Ouchies and tape residue.

You get incredibly self conscious

Constantly thinking about your gait is one part of it.

But another thing you're constantly thinking of is: Wearing shoes with toes is weird. Practically no one else does it but you, so it feels like everyone is staring at you. Truth is, most people don't notice other people's footwear at all. But some do. And you catch yourself constantly checking fellow pedestrians for strange glances.

And then there are several different pains from complaining muscles also contributing to your failing to not constantly think about your feet. But stamina will come. Today, after only a couple of days of barefoot walking, pain subsided and I actually could feel a little bit of lovely tingling instead.

Feeling weird, but loving it

I'm longing for the day I forget what kind of shoe I have on and just enjoy walking in a manner that is a bit closer to what nature intended. Until then, I'll just have to live with feeling a bit weird.