Barefoot update

It's been a few months now and my feet are still intact. I've been working my mileage up slowly and the longest distance I've done in my vibrams is a 6 mile trail/road run on Saturday. The trail was kind of rough, so it's taken my feet a few days to fully recover, but I'm undaunted. The feeling of the earth under your feet, and knowing exactly what is happening as you fly down those trails is still absolutely wonderful (though I will never deny that running is still a lot of work!). Especially because the last time I tried to run with my shoes on (last week) my knee was hurting so bad that I took my shoes off in frustration and ran the last two blocks completely barefoot. Take that Asics!!

I love all the looks I get from people as I run around with these black little glove like things looking like I didn't complete the transformation from Swamp Thing to human. Honestly, I'm still so excited about barefoot running, I kind of want to make pass-along cards with the basic tenants of barefooting to pass out to all the people who stare at my odd footwear. Here's what it would say:

Have you wondered while you were running, why am I here? What's the point? Why do my feet/ankles/knees hurt?
There is a better way my friend! Take of your shoes, run through the grass, join the barefoot revolution. The running shoe companies were just another creation of The Man to bring you down. Well, give that Man a Burmese roundhouse sphincter kick and throw those running shoes away. Yeah!

...or something equally as strange to the passerby. But then I'd probably just feel like a running version of all those people handing out flyers in Vegas and L.A. preaching different tenants of some spiritual path that will never really seem legitimate once it is on a flyer...and they've always just slightly creeped me out. Really, there is no way to truly explain something as foreign to our modern ears and eyes as barefoot running other than discovering it for yourself.

I tell you though, I'm dying for someone to stop me on one of my runs and ask me what the hell I'm doing so I could preach them the gospel of the naked foot (or the minimalistly shod one in my case) So, as far as I can see, my barefoot running is going well.