Dry Wash Runners

Reading Born to Run is the spiritual journey I never expected to encounter. It has come to me nonetheless and the result is both surprising and life-giving. I’ve never been this happy before and I wouldn’t have expected that running would play such a big part in that happiness. Some more thoughts on barefoot running. Even the first time running on my toes was amazing and transformative. The first thing I noticed was that it seemed to require more effort and concentration than I’d been used to. To do it I needed to use muscles that I hadn’t much used before. I also needed to pay more attention to the ground, its slopes and its variable surfaces. I was running the Queen Anne loop in a new pair of Brooks Green Silence shoes, the first such shoes I’d run in devoid of support. My girl-friend at the time had already begun experimenting with Five-Fingers shoes and encouraged me to give the whole toe-running thing a try. I wasn’t expecting transformation, I wasn’t expecting any

The first experience was amazing. I was running around Green Lake in my already well worn Luna sandals when a voice from somewhere deep simply made a request, “take them off.” I did. And what followed was a life-altering 3.2 miles of overwhelming bliss. And if this sounds like a bit of an odd thing to say about running around a rather mundane urban lake smack dab in the middle of metropolitan Seattle I shall take no offense. Little old Green Lake thrives with a host of known and unknown diseases and the path around it is littered with a small forest of signs warning local fishermen not to eat anything they catch out of it. It is an urban lake with no outlet and has been crapped in by water foul and human foul for hundreds of years. On warm summers it gets a smell that you don’t want to be downwind of and if you swim in it your skin starts to peel off. Barefoot running is something I’ve been doing for over a year now. I’m finding that it has intersected my life at one of tho