Barefoot Journal

It’s now been 10 weeks and 3 days barefoot. My feet are much tougher and only the roughest patches of road or asphalt will bother the feet now. I’ve noticed the tops of my feet need to be stretched out more. As I gain more use of my arches, the top of the foot has to be stretchy enough to accommodate. The right foot especially has trouble flexing all the way forward. There is a small, calcified lump 2/3 up the top of the foot toward the ankle, which seems to be a clue as to why that foot is less stretchy. When I massage it really hard, I get nerve sensations in my first 2 toes. Those first two toes are the ones that went numb in 2008 after standing in a new pair of shoes all day. But I know I have had that calcified lump since high school, I believe. Perhaps it was a holdover from an old ankle injury (I used to get them often), or maybe I dropped something heavy on that foot as a young lass. I don’t remember.

So stretching the tops of my feet more is my goal for this week, in order to  continue improving the the health of my feet.

Also, there is more skin breaking between my pinky toe and fourth toe on the right foot, and the fourth toe is very tender on the pinky toe side, just inside the ball of the foot. I have been massaging it and trying to help spread the pinky toe away from that toe. Both are untwisting very nicely. I think what is happening now is that the pinky toe is beginning to get its knuckle functionality back too. The left pinky toe appears to have some functionality already, but not the right one. When I pull on the right pinky toe, it pops every time, so I keep stretching it out to open up space for knuckle development. I will probably have knuckle development in that toe within a week, esp. if I keep stretching the foot back and massaging between the last 2 toes.

There is some wear patterns starting right in the center of the ball of each foot, and on the second and fourth toe of the left foot. On the right foot, it is just the center of the ball of the foot, as if I had stepped on a rock/sharp object there and it wants to recover.

Whenever I get wear patterns now, I suspect that the feet are compensating for a weakness. Given the pain I am having in my right fourth toe, I think it may be an overall compensation for that foot.

Eyesight – 20/20 project

I got excited about my eyesight experiment again yesterday. This is really progressing in phases.

I noticed (again) just how important it is to relax the vision for up-close work, and to focus the vision on blurry distant objects. My eyes are so conditioned to relax when looking at distant objects due to wearing glasses or contacts for 20 years. But I noticed when I tried to focus on distant objects (while keeping the eyes relaxed), they would actually come into sharp focus for a little bit, accompanied by a lot of eye tearing. The extra eye water seems to help a lot with distance focusing.

Also, I would get good results by stretching my eyes really wide to “feel” oxygen hitting the eyes. This feels really good to the eyes, and it brings on more eye tearing. I suspect my eyes have been oxygen-deprived after many years of contact-lens wearing also. My eyes are sensitive to silicon, so the high-oxygen silicon contact lenses weren’t an option for me. I also suspect that the mercury (thiomersal) in my contact lens solution has denatured some of the proteins in my eyes, but I’m not sure of what long-term effects this might have.

I have always had a lot of eye “floaters,” which I’ve been studying about recently.

This week, I am back to doing about 15 minutes of eye exercises each morning. I have done this for 3 days now.

It’s probably worth noting that I ate 2 carrots yesterday, and a couple hours later had my breakthrough/renewal of commitment!

Back/Shoulders

As my third priority, I am also working on reversing the curve of my thoracic spine. Likely due to the way I walk, and I suspect also my low thyroid, I have developed excessive lordosis of the thoracic spine (I’m not sure what that term is – kyphosis maybe?) Instead of a hump, I have a slight dip.

The way I walk now more on the balls of the feet rather than the heels is helping with this. It lets my chest round forward a bit more. But it is quite awkward to try to let the chest be more concave while keeping the shoulders down and back. It is more challenging.

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Maybe I will try to make this a weekly update. Probably should be taking pictures along the way too…

Today I did my first beach run specifically for more targeted arch development. And boy, was it effective.

I’m sure I did less than 1 mile of jogging with a handful of short sprints and lots of walking worked in. My calves locked up immediately when I tried to go up onto my tiptoes after a resting break standing in the ocean.

I could feel the arches very engaged on the beach sand (especially the weaker outer toes), it was perfect! I pushed it a bit too hard, though, considering I had spent much of the past 5 days in my room on the computer!

Something very frightening and interesting happened once I left the beach. The toes were a bit crampy, and my right big toe and 2nd toe were going numb in the very cool air (as were my fingers!). I went to a local cafe, warmed up a bit, was doing some passive foot stretching under the table, but found when I left the restaurant and hopped on a train, that my 2nd toe was still numb and very white.

I tried flexing it many times (it barely still flexed), rubbing my hands over it, breathing my hot air on it (a feat of flexibility!), and tucking the sole against my warm UV-radiated belly and leaning forward to compress the heat onto it. A few cycles of this and I wasn’t getting far. I was getting a bit panicked.

For some reason I felt compelled to sit on the foot with the toes flat. This was super-painful for the top of the foot. But after a good stretching, I put my foot down and color started coming back in. I noticed that my foot was sorest on top where the bones come together more, and that there has always been a kind of calcium or hard small lump fatty-deposit there. It was aching all around that area.

That told me that it wasn’t a temperature issue so much as it was a nerve impingement issue down the top of my foot. As I am developing my arch muscles. The bottoms of the feet shrink up, which means the top of my foot needs to open up and point more down, ballerina-like. It doesn’t yet have that flexibility, so I will need to train that more.

More sitting on my ankles and heels!

They say lessons in life are repeated until learned.

Since I’ve been walking everywhere without shoes, I’ve finally realized I am still walking too heavy on my right heel. I have almost a permanent tiny bruise right in the center of that heel from catching a sharp pebble too hard there, over and over. It hurts like a mofo when it happens. And today when it happened again during my 3+ mile walk in the city, I realized it’s just on that foot!

Come to think of it, back when I used to jog with shoes on, I would have this problem where my right heel would clip my left ankle on the inside, painfully right on the bone. So my right foot probably tends to evert (I believe this because I have to invert it and move it further distal for it to land “normal”) naturally and land harder on the heel.

So now, I have to work extra hard on getting the ball of the foot down sooner on the right side. Instead of my whole heel aching at the end of a day when wearing shoes, I get instant feedback when my heel finds a rock too hard.

Still totally worth the tradeoff.

As an update, my feet are still getting stronger/muscle-sore each day. They feel and look muscle-y now, instead of like a withered sick and pale child that spent the entire winter in bed. My hamstrings are also getting stronger (as evidenced by their tightness).

I had some interesting borderline numbness today, and noticed my big toe and next toe were a little too buddy-buddy during much of my hike on the cold ground. Probably the longest my toes have spent in the coldest weather (not including surfing in the winter here when entire foot would go numb) Seemed like the more ball pressure I used the more they spread out, though.

Enough for today…

I haven’t cried due to foot pain until today. The 4th toe on my right foot is reshaping and it is excruciatingly painful. I don’t recall dealing with this much pain since my shoulder surgery rehab in 2004, when the sadist therapists would manually stretch my arm all the way back over my head after having kept it in a sling for a few weeks, tearing tissues and making space. PTs are like carnies, I’ve decided. They start to get a little twisted hearing people scream all day.

Anyway, I have been applying more ball of the foot pressure when I walk to stimulate more arch development, and my 4th toe is beginning to have to activate. It appears that the 4th toe is like the ring finger: the weakest of the series. It is the most bent/deformed of all my toes, hence its needing the biggest structural change post-shoe.

That toe was the reason I stopped wearing shoes. It cried out to me that it was being squished sideways when I started walking more ball-heavy in my ballerina flats. I knew it needed more room, and I had ignored it for 32 years and let it grow cramped.

This is a really emotional process. I have to suffer the painful reshaping of my bones/joints, but I feel so compassionate in the process. I feel like I am finally caring for my feet, and not taking their work nor pain signals for granted. I feel like I am developing a relationship with my feet. We are getting to know one another and appreciate each other. I feel sorry for them. I tell them I’m sorry when they scream at me while restructuring. I think of all the other toes in the world who are not getting this loving attention and it makes me sad. We’ll get through this together, and in the end we’ll have 10 beautiful, functional toes, and sexy, gracefully curved arches.

I went hiking today with a date up a fairly steep incline. The trail was rocky but had enough mercifully rock-sparse dirt areas to be doable.

The last month has been so incredibly eye-opening, that I have already transitioned my 30-day-no-shoes foot experiment into a lifetime challenge. After just two weeks, I gave away all my shoes. I was that blown away by the results.

I will attempt to capture my myriad observations here now:
-I walk much more slowly now, and I barely land on the heel and use more of the ball of the foot to walk
-Due to walking more slowly/carefully and more on the balls of the feet, my legs spend more time under and behind me than in front of me
-I am developing hamstring strength just by walking differently. I have always had very poor hams vs. Quads strength. This is changing due to not heel-walking anymore.
-My stomach sticks out less and my butt sticks out less.
-My shin/calf muscles have totally changed. I wish I would have anticipated this and taken more before/after pictures. Perhaps I’ll take one soon and find some old full body pics of me to compare for you. My shin muscles are broader now. I used to feel just a single narrow muscle running up the front of the shin, it now feels like a full, thick sheath that could easily pick up all my toes :-)
-The bottom of my calves have filled in. I used to have very high looking calf muscles and little muscle development around the achilles. I have much more muscle lower to the heel now.
-I haven’t rolled an ankle at all since I started this. I must have rolled an ankle about twice a month prior to this experiment. Once, a couple weeks ago, I was walking on a parking lot curb and caught the edge with my foot. Instead of my ankle giving out painfully as it normally would, my entire left side fell toward the pavement as one unit, and I caught myself before falling. My head actually tilted at the same angle as my ankle. This is a really cool injury prevention feature. Nothing was hurt at all.
-The skin on my feet is getting tougher, but not calloused. It is still super-sensitive (a necessary foot function) but slightly more plasticized almost.
-the balls of my feet are still taking way too much pressure as my arches are still not strong enough to support my weight. They have fluid pockets that are manageable, like pre-blisters. I am pushing my arches slowly, but I have to back off a lot because my last two toes will start hurting. The last two toes are my weak link. I can’t put more pressure into the ball of my foot until they can support more weight.
-the skin on my second and third toes is wearing too thin in spots due to compensating for the last 2 deformed toes’ inability to distribute my weight. I sometimes bandage them and sometimes not.
-the skin under my pinky toes is breaking open as the toes become less curled/deformed and start to stretch out again to proper angle and length. New skin is growing in the gaps. The right pinky toe started activating first, about a week into the experiment. It felt like it was breaking, but after intense massage for 30 minutes it turned out all the connective tissue, knuckle joint, and muscles were just really groaning under the pressures of the change. The pain went away after one very intense massage session. I had to do the same with my left pinky toe about two weeks later when it started its untwisting process. About 30 minutes of intensely painful massage and it felt much better.
-My feet get cold quickly but adapt very quickly and do not “feel cold” often. Splashing in rain puddles feels AMAZING. I love rainy days now :-) On very cold mornings the feet will almost become numb and then after about 5-10 minutes they regain all their sensitivity and feel warm again. I am careful about not letting them feel numb.
-My feet are not catching fungus or other infections. In fact, my feet have never felt healthier fungus-wise. I’ve had a lot of issues with this as a life-long athlete, and this is the longest I have gone without worrying about my toes peeling etc. due to shoe issues (it got especially bad with my Vibrams, and no I will not buy socks so that I can wear shoes that make me feel barefoot. I’ve cut out the expensive and frankly ugly middlemen!)
-I’ve gotten about three standard reactions from strangers: (1) dispproving looks (as in: how irresponsible of her to have left her shoes at home/work, not planned well, etc.); (2) friendlier looks, like I’m not above you – I’m not trying to one-up you with my footwear. I become more approachable to a lot of people (3) mostly black people have been extremely vocal about it. Only black bus drivers have expelled me from muni (about 15-20% of the buses I’ve ridden, approximately) or commented about my lack of shoes. No other race has mentioned it outright. I believe this is because blacks are held to higher standards of dress to achieve the same success as whites. They have been oppressed more, and are more sensitive to rules and oppression. Those not in positions of power have either scolded me without listening or curiously questioned me about it and listened to my answer thoughtfully. I could write a book about the different reactions I have gotten and their deeper meanings.

That’s all I have energy for tonight, more to come…