“You’re going to hurt yourself.”
I love when people tell me this. They see me for a few precious moments, and believe they have all the information they need to judge. They say it with some sort of certainty and some semblance of distaste. I’m sure most traceurs who have attempted training barefoot has heard this phrase at one point or another. This account does not come from some training session, though. The quote above comes from a nice gentleman I met in Bloomfield, NJ coming back from the NYPK jam.
You see, for the past month or so, I have made an effort to be as barefoot as possible and the bottoms of my feet have experienced everything from sand, water, concrete and asphalt, tar, gum, rocks, and the occasional metal piece. I walked, block after block, through the gummy, dirty, and disrespected streets of New York City.
At first I did it simply just to do it. There was no social action or emotional connection to it all. I enjoy being barefoot and I’m not particularly moved or disgusted at the idea of letting my skin touch a well traveled city street. I found it freeing.
Mark Toorock recently posed a question on the American Parkour fourms asking, “Why does most of society follow the “no shirt, no shoes, no service” ideology?” At first I had no decent answer.
This article could be filled with loads of research in an attempt to persuade you and the general public that barefoot is not gross, not unhealthy, and will actually better your gait, improve muscular dexterity, strength, and balance, and also save your toes from all the bacteria that fester in the confines of shoe wearing. But honestly, that means nothing. Every smoker knows the health risks associated with their habit or addiction. Spewing health knowledge will do nothing to solve this problem.
The moment that man in Bloomfield said those words to me, I had an answer. It came to me sharply and suddenly.
“You’re going to hurt yourself. Broken beer bottles and metal, bro, that’s dangerous!”
I stopped and smiled, looking at ground and said, “Imagine a world where no one wore shoes, how much motivation there would be to keep these streets clean…”
He stared at me for a moment, laughed and replied, “Perhaps tomorrow, then.”
I knew he was lying, but imagine for a moment what roads in New York City would look like if, when someone spit their gum out, it meant every resident would have to step in it; If whenever a glass bottle was broken, everyone, including the culprit, were at risk of gouging their feet; If every oil spill, littered decay, and rusted metal piece meant that every last person was suddenly at risk for your own selfishness and disrespect.
Why must we be so connected to our shoes? Why do we continue to spread this stigma that you are somehow dirty or lowly for choosing to wiggle your toes in the free open air? Shoes no longer have to be the necessity they have become, and only now are we realizing the systemic mistake in placing our long term health in the hands of people like Nike, Reebok, and Asics.
Imagine a New York City without broken glass every couple of feet. Imagine a Chicago sidewalk free of chewed up gum. Perhaps I’m a dreamer, but imagine how the world would glimmer, if society broke through their closed mindedness, and embraced the barefoot alternative.