Dirt Sidewalks

I see it has been a while since I last posted, so I felt an update was due.  If you have been following my blog you can see that my summer was full.  At the end of summer we had to shift gears and start getting ready for school.  New school supplies and clothes had to be purchased.  The new schedule for my oldest daughter, now in middle school, has me getting up an hour earlier and it is taking me way too long to adjust to my new schedule.  I think she is doing better than me.

I'm still barefooting it as much as possible.  A little funny if you were a fly on the wall.  I walk everywhere barefoot, but when I shop locally I put on my vivobarefoot sandals to enter the store.  It really feels a little backwards.  Usually one takes off shoes when you enter your home and here I am putting something on.

I am attending church Sunday nights barefoot and the other day the Pastor's wife laughed when she saw I was barefoot.  Not a bad laugh, but more from amusement that I was still barefoot.  Perhaps, since summer is now over.  Not sure what funny bone I hit, but at least I made someone smile.

Today I walked to and from work barefoot and the temperatures were below 50ºF on the way in and 57ºF on the way home.  I'm wondering how low I can go, so it should be an interesting fall.  On the way home I had the opportunity to walk on a section of sidewalk that had been torn up.  As I walked on the dirt I never knew what my feet were going to encounter underneath the top layer of sand.  It was also interesting to  note, that most of the shoed people seemed to be avoiding the now sand sidewalk and using the street.



There is one problem.  I am still developing a blister of sorts between my big toe and its neighboring toe.  I've seen a coach and he informs me I need to learn to activate different muscles and gave me some exercises to help me work towards this goal.  Of course being 50+ I have a lot of muscles that are no longer being used like they should, so hopefully this will help me out in the future as well.  But today I think my posture might be the biggest culprit.

My coach had discussed with me that I needed to activate my glutes more, which I never realized I don't really do while walking.  How's that possible, I'm not sure.  I had started walking differently and did notice a difference, but all of a sudden the blister comes back bigger than ever.  I realized that I had stopped walking in the way my coach suggested.  Today I tried his method again and I think it will help the blister problem.

Another Run and a Grocery Store

Sundays I attend church in the morning. The church has a poured concrete floor and even with my Vivobarefoot shoes I can still feel the heat being taken from my body, so it is not warm enough to skip the shoes at church just yet.  We are still in the middle of winter, so I feel lucky to have accomplished as much as I have so far.


THE RUN
Sunday arrived warm again, so I decided to take another run in the afternoon.  I was hoping to be able to run the whole mile.  This run has more up hills compared to the last run on Thursday, so I wasn't sure I would make the whole distance.  Once again I notice how cool the pavement was and you could feel where the sun had a chance to thaw out the ground a bit more.  Running barefoot tunes you into nature to a whole new level, even though I am in the middle of the city.  My toes got a bit cold on this run, but I managed to run the whole mile in 12 minutes.  I was very happy.

GROCERY STORE
After the run I walked over to the nearby grocery store for some food.  It really seems like most people don't notice your feet.  When I grabbed a cart it was funny how I thought this would help hide my feet a bit.  Was making a ham and chicken casserole, so visited the deli counter to get only the amount of ham I needed, just one thick slice.  As the lady took my order and helped me pick out what I wanted I don't think she even noticed my feet.  The checkout process at the end went very smoothly as well.  Four stores and no problem.  This grocery store was the biggest store I have visited yet.

After I finished my run and errands I noticed my feet had warmed up and they stayed nice and toasty warm for the rest of the night.

INSIDE MY HEAD
It is interesting when I read another blog about their barefoot experiences it always did seem they were hyper aware of their feet being bare and most of those around them didn't notice or at least didn't comment.   I realized that a lot of my concerns would be in my head and that I too would be hyper aware of my feet while most others wouldn't notice.  But you still don't know when you will be called out, so until you have some experience interacting with others a few times you will still be on high alert.  Yet despite this the experience is still enjoyable, even though I may be a bit self conscious at this stage.  I'm wondering about my own reaction to others reaction will be.  Will I be more focused on sharing this new found joy and freedom of walking barefoot or will something else stumble out of my mouth.

Stats:
Miles Run Barefoot: 3

Stores Visited 4

Days 100% Barefoot - 0

Two More Stores

Had a morning men's breakfast to attend and it was still a little cold out so I wore some Vivobarefoot shoes.  After the breakfast I returned home and took of my shoes for the rest of the day.  Then I began working on my current project, restoring wainscoting in the bathroom.

After working in the bathroom for a short period of time I realized I needed some protective gloves.  I  was washing off the stripper residue on the wainscoting and the two left handed gloves just weren't cutting it.  So I headed over to the local dollar store, still barefooted, to purchase the needed gloves. I was wearing my shorts and I was very aware of my bare feet.  But it was just a short walk and the temperatures were in the 50s.  Inside it didn't take me too much wandering to find the gloves and was able to make my purchase without any problem.  I didn't even hear or notice any reaction.

Back to work the gloves quickly disintegrated.  So I decided to head over to the hardware store to buy some better gloves.  I asked my mother to watch my daughter and she told me to put some shoes on.  I asked her if she thought I would actually walked to the store without shoes and then left.  I guess she has already caught on to my new thing. I'll have to discuss at a later time my families reaction so far.

The hardware store is about 2 tenths of a mile away.  I visit this hardware store a lot so was very interested to hear their comments.  I went straight to the paint department and a kid I don't usually see assisted me in finding the necessary gloves and then I checked out.  Nothing was said, though I'm sure the kid who assisted me must have notice my bare feet, the cashier knows me by name and he couldn't really see my feet from behind his counter.

It was good not to be bothered with shoes and to take the short stroll to the store barefooted.  Still a bit cool and I wouldn't want to go much further, but summer is coming and it will be very warm soon.

Here are some pictures of my current project. This bathroom has a claw foot tub, so for now we plan to leave the tiles on the back wall, until we replace the floor and need to take out the tub. Otherwise it will be a pain to get all the tile off and wall cleaned.

The lower walls were covered in plastic tile, as you can see in the picture above, which popped off the wall relatively easily with a putty knife.  Then we were left with the glue (not shown), which a hot gun helped soften up so we could scrape it off.  This left some residual glue and the old varnish.  So we used stripper to get the wall down to the bare wood.  

 We then cleaned the wall with some thinner to remove any remaining varnish and stripper.  This was after we finished cleaning up the wall.  We will add some molding on the bottom, so we were not too concerned about the very bottom.

Loads of pipes running on the outside of the wall, makes it a real pain to clean.  But it is coming.  Hope to start painting next Saturday.