Get A Wiggle On . . . Takes A Barefoot Experiment.

Thanks to the amazing and enthusiastic fitness and nutrition coach, Kate Fischer, managing owner of Edge Performance Fitness, I am on the roster of speakers for a workshop on transitioning to barefoot or minimal shoes for running or walking. This Natural Movement Workshop will feature the author of The Barefoot Book, Daniel Howell, and the authors of Barefoot Running, Michael Sandler and Jessica Lee. In addition, several local experts such as Dr. Ray McClanahan, Dr. Suzanne Lady, and Leif Rustvold, who are all barefoot or minimal runners, will speak. The purpose of the workshop is to prepare a person who wants to run or walk barefoot for doing so. It is not a good idea to simply change shoe types or forego shoes and go run, though plenty of people will do so and then tell you how unsuccessful it was. Honestly, transitions of any kind take time, that’s why it’s called a transition. (To sign up for the workshop, call Edge 503.265.8685 or email info@edgeperformancefitness.com. Attendance is limited, so sign up now.)

My role in the workshop is to give some hands-on strategies for increasing flexibility and resilience of the bones and muscles of the feet using Awareness Through Movement® lessons of the Feldenkrais Method® in a workshop titled Feet So Flexible, Feet So Fast. I’m excited to be part of this adventure and feel honored that Kate has included my profession as part of the mix.

I decided that a part of my preparation for the workshop would be a description of my experience while making my own shift as toward being barefoot or minimal during the month preceding the workshop. My motivation to make this change is that I have a hard time finding shoes that fit well or support the freedom of movement I know is possible in my human foot, the kind I see in my cat’s foot or my dog’s paw. That’s what I want, the resilience that comes from being close to the ground and un-mummified as so many shoe/sock combinations effectively do.

Note: I have NOT read either of the books I mentioned above, on purpose. My experiment here is to track my sensations and kinesthetic awareness of the shifts and changes in my gait as I work toward longer and longer periods in minimal shoes and I wanted to do this without prior knowledge of what it should be like. I have purchased a pair of Vibram Five Fingers, October 11, 2010, so I’m a newby just like all the folks who’ll be attending our workshop. Well, I’m not entirely a newby. My job is to teach attention skills and help others build awareness and I am well-trained to tune in to the shifts and changes in my own organization. But it will be fun to approach the workshop from this place of curiosity. A curious mind is an open mind. I invite you to comment, ask questions, share your own experience.

So, to begin . . . Experiment 1

A few weeks ago, Ray (McClanahan), podiatrist, handed me a pair of Correct Toes, his invention and his contribution to the health and wellness of anyone’s feet. I went home and put them on and wore them around the house for a while and got used to them. He had warned, and the warning on the package says, that you should build up the amount of time you wear them very slowly. Toes that have been crammed inside shoes for decades aren’t used to being spread apart. I’ve witnessed that in my own movement practice that many people have difficulty spreading their toes apart without pain.

I experienced little discomfort with the Correct Toes, likely because I’ve been moving and plying my feet and toes for years. So, I decided to go out for a walk.

I wore my Correct Toes with a pair of socks over the top of them and put on a pair of Crocs. These are the only shoes I own that the Correct Toes would fit inside and I wanted to transition, not go cold turkey to barefoot. I headed out with my dogs, a perfect constraint in that walking my dogs forces me to stop and start and go slow while they sniff their way though the neighborhood.

The first and most important thing I noted when walking with my toes spaced apart is that my sacrum was moving. A lot. I’ve had some tensions in my sacrum likely from all the sitting while blogging and writing. Wow. I mean wow. I could feel all kinds of tensions releasing. Wild to notice it as if something was dissolving. And, my sacrum became warm, my pelvis became free and the dogs and I practically skipped along.

Nice experiment for a first go round……..I kept wearing the Correct Toes at night for a few more days and occasionally during the day time. I made a point to work with my own feet and their grasping and bending capabilities over the next week.

Experiment 2:

A couple of days later, I went out walking with the dogs, minus the Correct Toes. I wore a pair of Merrill’s that were flat, no lift in the heel and no curl up of the toes. The top of the Merrill is mesh so even though the toe box isn’t wide, there was a lot of give. I had hiked in them several weeks earlier and found that my feet and ankles felt great, better than almost any other shoe I had hiked in.

Without really considering what I was doing, I began to experiment with just thinking about walking with toes spread wide. I could feel a bit of actual widening of my toes, but I focused more on holding the intention of having a wide spread foot. I shifted back and forth between holding the intention and letting it go.

After a few minutes of directing my attention and intention, I felt the same sensation that I’d felt when I had the Correct Toes on. My sacrum shifted and I felt more movement as I walked. Whoo hoo……this was becoming fun.

Now, as I’m experimenting with using a widespread toes intention in any shoe that I wear, I am noticing how tense my foot gets when my toes come close together and how much the focal point of force into the ground gets narrowed down to that place on the ball of my foot, roughly between my second and third toes. No wonder I used to have a callus on that part of my foot. When I intend to walk with widespread toes, I am noticing how much more evenly distributed the force is with each step.

In the next blog post, I’ll write about Experiment 3, getting my Vibram Five Fingers and going for my first outside walk. Another wow experience.

Get a Wiggle On . . . evolves.

Hey you, half-marathoner, 5K-er, half-miler, and most importantly . . . WALKER!

You’ve likely noticed that this blog is a little bogged down. Sorta rhymes and I like rhyming, so keep watching for more. Never know what’s in store. Anyway, I digress. I began this blog to write out the thoughts I’d been collecting for a book, which became an e-book and then morphed into this blog, and now we’re back to the e-book stage. So……stay tuned. Hoping for a January 2011 release.

In the meantime, I’m shifting the focus to walking. Women who walk. Women who walk fast, slow, languidly, quickly, women who walk with purpose and dreams, women who carry inside them all the memories of good, sorrowful, poignant, hurtful, yummy, and, and, and….the list goes on of the memories that live inside each of us. Those memories go with you on a walk. They color and flavor your every step and your every interpretation of what you see.

Kate Fischer, Managing Owner of Edge

Also, to put in a plug for my new gig at Edge Performance Fitness. Edge is not your average gym. In fact, it’s about as unaverage as you can get. Inspired by Kate Fischer, woman of extreme vision, Edge is really a place to come and get an unusual gym experience. If you’re sick of the big screen TVs blaring and the spandex pick-up scene, well……this might just be your sophisticated alternative. You can go to their website and learn more, but just know it’s hard to feel it unless you’re there.

I am at Edge on Wednesdays giving Feldenkrais® lessons on how to take care of yourself while you’re keeping fit. Think of it as building foundations for fitness. Email me to schedule, kim@kimcottrell.com. Edge Members get 1/2 price lessons for July and August so get on over here!!

And, super fun for me . . . I’ll be doing a 2-hour workshop at Edge on September 12, 3-5, Feldenkrais Foundations for Fitness. $25 for non-members, $15 for members.

It’s a new day, a new moment, a new second. Let’s seize as many of them as we can, what say you?

And, now to the walk . . .

Number One Necessity: A Good Pair of Shoes

The single most important item for walking is a good pair of shoes. While most of the walkers I train do their actual 13-mile or 26 mile event in running shoes, it’s possible to walk anywhere, anytime, with the shoes you’d use to tour a foreign country or the casual loafers you wear to lounge around town on the weekend.

Walking Secret Number One: You don’t need to wait for a special time to get your training miles under your belt. You could walk to work and get your workout completed with a purpose. You could go sight-seeing or hike in the nearby hills. Every walk or hike counts and any number of shoes are suitable for those occasions.

Search high and low for good shoes.

I once travelled to Bosnia on a volunteer vacation and found myself with an opportunity to hike in the mountains with a local mountaineer. I was thrilled since the country was riddled with landmines and the only safe way to hike in the hills was to have a local guide. We arrived at an apartment building on the outskirts of Sarajevo, the building riddled with holes from mortar fire and unrepaired 5 years after the Bosnian war, where we met our guide.

Our guide was a local mountaineer and a student in social science at the university. He took one wide-eyed look at my shoes and politely told me he thought I needed a different pair. Though I was wearing a very sturdy pair of Dutch-made Wolky sandals with a strap that firmly secured them to my feet, they were sandals nonetheless. My socks were polypropelene with individual toes so I was not worried about blisters. It was July and there was only a slight chance of rain for the day. I knew this was the best I could do given that I was halfway around the continent from all my other shoes.

Don't overlook the lowly loafer.

I replied that I would take the risk and that I had no other shoes and that if I was going to go, these would have to do. In the end, I was one of the few hikers from the US who kept up with the guide and I had no problems with my feet or with keeping my footing on the trail. The guide seemed impressed and I learned an important lesson that day; a certain type of shoe isn’t necessary even for long walks. More important than the type of shoe, is a shoe that allows for movement of the foot and all its bones and joints. Since then, I’ve talked to friends who’ve hiked in Tevas and other non-specialized shoes. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about shoe sizes, an issue that seems to hold much controversy and consternation for many of us walkers.

And now, to the walk . . .

If the Shoe Fits . . .

Walker Secret Number Two: As important as it is to find a good pair of shoes, it’s more important that they be sized correctly for your feet. Unless you’ve just walked in off the half-marathon course, your foot will be smaller than the size you need. After a long distance event, when your feet are as swollen as they’ll ever be, that is the perfect time to try on a pair of new shoes. This is simple physiology. You walk long distances and your feet swell. Period.

Most of us don’t shop for shoes after the big event, so we are looking at fitting a shoe to an unswollen foot. Thus, many of us experience foot pain that shows up as blisters, joint pain, loss of toenails, and on and on. Every year during the training, I find myself repeating this over and over. Most new walkers roll their eyes or mutter under their breath in disbelief. Never mind, they’ll be back when they need help because they hurt and can’t go on. Or, worst case, they drop out of the training program and never know they might have been helped if they’d just bought their shoes a size bigger. Two colleagues, a podiatrist and a reflexologist, note that over 80% of the problems their patients experience could have been prevented if they’d been wearing shoes that were the right size.

Your dream shoes should be long enough, but they should also give you the widest possible toe-box for the health of your toes. Dr. McClanahan, NW Foot and Ankle, Portland, reports that there are studies citing 75-90 percent of people are wearing shoes that are too small. I’ll be covering the history of how shoes got shaped, but in a later post. In summary, there is more to shoe-sizing than length. I know I’m always after the walkers I coach to get longer shoes so their toes have room. A too-long shoe does two things, it gives room for the toes to stretch out in length and it puts the widest part of the shoe further forward on the foot. But, it’s important to have  shoe that’s wide enough to start with.

Ray McClanahan, podiatrist

In addition, Dr. McClanahan strongly urges walkers to wear shoes that are much flatter and less engineered in order to support the healthy action of the feet. Apparently, this idea of a non-shoe, or the barefoot revolution, is catching on because not only are athletic shoes becoming more neutral, i.e. the heel is lower and the toe is not turned up so much, but dress and casual shoe designs are following suit. There are more and more casual shoes available that are flat and without a built up sole. Take note: a shoe with a turned up toe and a built up heel does not let your foot go through the normal motion that feet go through when walking.

But, if we’re so unaware of whether a shoe is too small for us, we’re also not listening when the salesman tell us we should have something bigger. Over and over, the clerks at the Foot Traffic store on NE Fremont in Portland tell me they suggest that customers buy a size larger and generally the customers feel the shoe is already too big and they leave the store with a size smaller than recommended. Seldom do the clerks feel comfortable pressuring the customer. Then invariably, that walker comes to stand before me and asks, “what do you think of my new shoes?” I can see, without checking with my hands, that their foot and toes completely fill up the toe box and that there is not any extra room for their toes to move or swell or be free. I usually recommend they get a larger size.

The urge to do what we’ve always done weighs heavily on our decisions. The size matters, or so we’re conditioned to believe. And really, what is normal? What matters? Despite a great deal of freedom in our culture, we struggle to make a decision based on something other than the rituals and habits we’ve become accustomed to. After all, a pair of shoes is no small investment for most of us. We should be careful and in our conservative mode, we buy what we’ve always bought whether or not that’s good for us now.

There are 3 main reasons to buy shoes that feel too large:

• Feet have 26 bones, 17 joints, and 33 muscles. Each of these joints has the potential to move and bend and do the job of holding much weight. When the foot is crammed into a too-tight shoe, the bones cannot move and the joints cannot do their job of absorbing the force of each footstep. Aches, pains, and injuries follow. I know of one woman who lost every single toe-nail after completing the Portland marathon.
• Feet swell during exercise, particularly during long distance events. By the time you’ve been on your feet 3-4 hours for the half-marathon, your feet have swollen at least one or two sizes, again back to that issue of the toes and bones and joints needing space to move, bend, and absorb the force. If your shoes are too tight, when you get to the end of the event, you’ll be in some excruciating discomfort.
• Friction. This is the plague of the long distance walker. Next to overheating, friction is your worst enemy, put them together and it’s killer. After hours of contact between the shoe and your foot (or your arm and your shirt, your leg and your shorts), you’ll find that the rubbing and friction causes blisters, callouses, and sores. Callouses would be harmless, but they usually follow blisters and that process is painful to say the least. Other issues with too small shoes are bunions, hammer toes, fungus, and on and on.

So, what’s your take-home message? Buy a shoe that feels a little bit like you’re clowning around. I wear shoes so they fit super loose and I am so grateful for all that extra space at about mile 10 of the half-marathon, especially when it’s hot and those last 3.1 miles feel like the longest promenade I’ve ever walked in my life. Stay tuned for more information on fitting, on how shoes got designed the way they are, and what shape is the best for the function of walking.

And now, to the walk . . .