The Snow is Here

It has snowed two nights so far. The first was the night before Thanksgiving. I raced on Thanksgiving in shoes, so I wasn't really thinking about barefooting that day. The snow only stuck on the grass. I did leave the house and drive to the race barefoot, and I did spend as much of the day shoeless as possible. But there was no running on that snow day. The second snow as last weekend, on Saturday night. I didn't run on Sunday because I went skiing. So Monday rolled around yesterday and I had gone to work and come home barefoot on the cold ground and in the car barefoot with no problem, so I set off from my house barefoot for the first part of my run, as I have been doing (see previous post). There were sections of wet pavement and dry pavement. I had some frozen toes after a couple of minutes. It was because of the wet pavement. Where there were longer sections of dry road, my feet warmed up. But there were not enough of those kinds of sections. A couple of times cars forced me into some slush on the side of the road. Surprisingly, the few steps in the slush was not as bad as the wet sections of pavement. I made it a mile, taking the shortest loop back to my house to put shoes on, in about 8:40. By then my toes were quite frozen. It took a couple of miles running in shoes for them to warm up completely.

I am discovering that going barefoot is more than just an exercise in running better, it is an exercise about changing the power of your mind to overcome all the things that society has programmed into it that may not necessarily be true. I was thinking of joining a gym this winter to take advantage of the treadmills, and was hoping to find one that would have no problem with running on their equipment barefoot. But trying to get through it despite the weather outside is more of this exercise in mental power.