Why Running Barefoot Thanks to many boomer friends for joining my bare feet this weekend in your various venues. It used to be a pretty lonely affair running barefoot but I’ve got lots of barefoot bro’s and sisses all over the place now. For the last five years, our www.runningbarefoot.org annual PNW RunningBarefoot Festival weekend in Seattle has consisted of two events, a 3.3 mile road run on Saturday and a 5k trail run on Sunday. Both celebrate the joy of being able to run free in the fresh air with the bare feet that have been mostly confined in the dark and damp prisons of various kinds of footwear ever since we were born. The “RunningBarefoot cites" thread recounts some of those benefits including healthy feet, no blisters, injury-minimizing ball-heel-ball or midfoot landings, being faster, etc. . . . . . . . . . SATURDAY BAREFOOT ROAD RUN The road part consists of all barefooted runners in the 3.3 mile Queen Anne Fun Run around the outer perimeter of the 456 foot Queen Ann Hill area overlooking Seattle Center and the Space Needle (605’) and Elliott Bay in Puget Sound and Union Bay between the Sound and Lake Washington. It’s the Queen Anne Festival part of the month long Seafair extravaganza and includes a kids’ parade and hat contest in the fun run. Everyone who lets their feet out of their shoes is a winner and I always create as many categories as necessary for the Queen Anne part for each and every of the up-to five barefooters we’ve had over the years to win something but, this year, I was the only one (except for some dogs and infants in strollers) so I won everything. Although I'm mostly a weekend fitness fun runner, I enjoy everyone's more competitive rr’s and used some of the reported strategies to my advantage when, after a spirited start on smooth, newly-paved surfaces for the first 3/4 miles, another AG’er powered on by up a slight climb along the residential streets. The pavement was a little rougher but it was old and the embedded gravel was round, smooth, riverbed excavated and not the man-made, sharp crushed stuff so I was able to keep Mr. Nemesis in sight circling around the perimeter for the next 2 miles until more smoothie surfaces (and becoming a slight downhill) permitted another spirited sprint to the finish about a minute in the lead. It seemed even the neighborhood newspaper reporter was impressed as he came over and asked, “how did you do that!” However, it turned out he was asking about running in bare feet, not about how fast I thought I was . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SUNDAY BAREFOOT 5K TRAIL RUN After two major footwear malfunctions when sharp, man-made crushed gravel on otherwise hard-packed dirt rails-to-trails surfaces caused DNF’s in two of the four ultras I’ve done this year, I looked forward some test runs up-and-down the 5K Bare Feet Fun Run course in some various combination of thongs reinforced with glued-on/stitched insoles and outter soles and was able to run the course four times in them before the actual start. In the past, the event itself has been barefoot with other barefoot runners, especially a California contingent, but I was the only one this year so kept on my old Merrell Bahria Trail Thongs with the broken straps sewn on tightly and glued down to see how they’d fare running as hard as I could. Fortunately, a golden goddess ended up in my vicinity as we’d pass and catch-up to each other on the way up until she got pretty far ahead where I couldn’t see her any more until catching her near the end where the trail narrowed in a last steep section before a final dash across the parking lot to finish for a five second “victory.” Afterwards, while I was catching my breath and looking at the line for the Vitamin drink being offered to finishers, she came over with one for me too and, just as I was thinking the same, said, “thanks for the inspiration." “I think I’m kind of liking the racing aspects of the weekend events after all,” he thought while relaxing in the post-RACE hot tub.