My bear feet are bigger than yours!

Hello world, again.

I am Simon.  My name is ironic, because it is often translated as to mean 'he who hears', and yet my hearing is not so great.

Now, there's a philosophy that I really really like.  And that is that all of the muscles and nerve endings on the soles of your feet are connected to different parts of your body.  I assume that this is how reflexology works, but I am not so interested in massaging other people's feet.  I do give a lot of upper back and neck massages, but for some reason I have never felt compelled to massage anyone's feet before...I think that foot massagers are a special breed of people, perhaps of a similar kind to that Tarantino guy.
But I am into exploring making use of these magical gems at the bottoms of my legs.  I don't think that I enable them to be as magical as they could be, as I keep them for too often in a comfortable environment that merely decreases the power of their muscles.

One of the reasons for me deciding to explore running barefoot is this: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100127134241.htm.  In March of this year, I ran the Bath Half.  I had ran some quite long distances before, but never 13 miles.  I didn't want to mess up my new badminton shoes, so I decided to go out with some dodgy trainers, thinking that they're still shoes and so I'd still be fine.  I learnt through the experience that I had, of being unable to walk without pain for the following two weeks and still continuing to have some pain in my feet for upto a month after, that not all shoes are good shoes.  In fact, after this run, I started my first explorations in walking barefoot.  Walking barefoot, for the first couple of painful weeks, was the most comfortable way of walking, as my feet muscles had been damaged and shoes seemed to just restrict the muscles moreso.

A friend of mine in Bath began to urge me, since way before the summer, to start running barefoot with her.  I agreed that I will plan for it when I got back to Bath after the summer.  She hadn't really ran barefoot before, but I liked the idea of this adventure that we'd share.

I was in Alicante, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, for a month in the summer.  The weather was good, so I mostly walked around topless and barefooted.  There were times when I'd go to a shop and realise that I'd forgotten to pack my sandles, and so either I was not allowed into the shop or I had to sneak in.  Shop workers seem to not like bare feet in Alicante.  I was running often in Alicante, as there was very good reason to be doing so.  My brother had a room in a flat about twenty minutes run from the beach, so I often ran down to the beach with just swimming shorts on, and nothing else.  My bare feet felt lovely cycling the ground - it felt at times like I was hovering along the surface of the ground, as there was no aftershock being felt throughout my body.

Perhaps due to excessive wintery cycling on a bike that was way too big for me, or perhaps because of playing badminton at a competition level (both arguments are probably equally as likely), I have attained a hip injury that makes a lot of physical activity a little stressful.  I haven't ran a huge amount this year because of this injury:- after the Bath Half in March, I had been planning to run some 10k's throughout the year, but this hasn't happened because I've not been able to begin running distances with my dodgy hip.  However, that running that I did in Alicante had very little consequence on my body.  I believe that the findings from that study I have linked above, of how barefoot runners do not have to absorb the collision impact that shoe-wearing runners absorb, is the reason for why barefoot running was so good for me in Alicante.

I left Alicante for a Buddhist community in the Spanish Pyrenees.  The landscape was harsh, and very rocky.  My barefoot running routine was forced to stop, because I could not master the terrain there.

When I got back to England, I went on a hike in North Norfolk.  For the first day and a half-or-so, I walked completely barefooted.  It felt good, but I really didn't feel good to be walking along the boardwalked path that was covered in chicken wire.  So the sandles soon were used.

Since then, I haven't really been barefooted so much.  This little adventure with Transition Bath is incredibly exciting for me, as I believe that it will be very life-affirming.  This will be my first deep exploration into my feet's properties.