Barefoot Craze in North Carolina- Toe Shoes not so Crazy

A few weeks back I was interviewed by the Charlotte NBC news team.  They came out to my office on my dock and interviewed me for about an hour, then I went running around the neighborhood for about an hour with essentially a two person news team.    That story finally aired last night(

‘Barefoot running’ craze hits Charlotte

and the article and video are now available online too. (Note the maroon toe shoes below are not the shoes I have, and not really the best shoes for running either, there’s a different model better suited for running.  These shoes are better for yoga and martial arts.

Here is the result!

It was a lot of fun, and frankly felt like something of a tv show from a production perspective.  I don’t have a lot of experience with TV nor the news myself.  But I have been on TV several times over the years.

But this was a first from the perspective of combining both an interview and from the experience of all the filming.  They recorded what seemed to be about 2 hours worth of material.  Well actually it was probably really about an hour, it just took 2 hours to set everything up.  But that 1 hour boiled down to 2 minutes and twenty seconds of interview, which also featured a few other people in other interviews. 

So any way, I was fascinated with the process.  I’ve done some video work for the web over the years, mostly video tutorials, and with much inferior equipment and training, but that experience gave me enough of a perspective on what was going on to appreciate the whole situation better.

It actually took about a month or so for the interview to actually make it onto the news, which was probably more of a surprise than I expected.  I had this notion that the interview would probably air with a week or so, but even in my own experience videos I shoot or create often times don’t see the  light of day for weeks or months and some never make it off my hard drive at all!

Now, since the interview was taken, I have started to move on with my barefoot adventures.  This week in fact I started cross training going completely barefoot.

When I first started running in Vibrams, I would run a mile and then walk a mile.

Now, I am taking it even easier, walking a mile and jogging a bit during that walk.

Mostly, I am trying to build up the pads on my feet a bit, and maybe more so build up my confidence that I can run barefoot on the streets.

So far the experience has been very good.  Not quite as much of a pleasure as putting on toe shoes were the first time, but I can definitely feel even more muscles getting a work out when I go barefoot all together.

Frankly, I’m not sure where this is all taking me, but the journey has been interesting so far.