Beyond Barefoot

OK, Boomers out there (Heck, the way things are going, I could ask a 16 year-old the same questions!): When's the last time you climbed a tree? When's the last time you hopped over a fence? How about a forward roll? While hiking, when's the last time you got down on your belly and crawled under a log blocking the trail rather than looking for a way around? If you found yourself on the tenth floor of a burning building with no elevator and no shoes, could you save yourself? Could you save your companion?

When's the last time a book changed your life, even a little bit? I won't try to review Christopher McDougall's Born to Run here. It's been all over the news, and by now just about anyone who has an interest in running has read it or as heard all about it. What I want to do is reflect on how some of the revelations in the book have influenced my thinking about a lot of things.

I'm a cynic. I know it, and everyone close to me is sick of it. But, as I like to say, I come by my cynicism honestly. One of the main threads through this book deals with the myth and the scam of the modern running shoe. Humans evolved for millions of years and survived by running barefoot, yet in a few short decades the running shoe industry has everyone convinced that they can't jog a step without the the latest high-tech - and high-profit - footwear. OK, I am predisposed to the argument that running shoes can wreck your body because I'm suffering with a nagging and persistent case of plantar fasciitis, but the basic argument makes sense to me: Because of their form, support and cushioning, running shoes encourage runners to land heel-first, putting tremendous unnatural strain on the body. Furthermore, by supporting feet so thoroughly, these shoes actually weaken them.

Born to Run is mostly about running barefoot, but it is helping me to braid together several threads of thought that have be twisting around in my brain for some time now. What it is boiling down to is that we American adults - in typical Boomer over-achiever fashion - are going about exercise all wrong. How many of us spend hours on a treadmill bored out of our minds, going nowhere? How many millions of miles have we pounded out on asphalt running in straight lines preparing for 10K's and marathons? How many millions of dollars have we spent because we are convinced we need gyms, trainers and fancy equipment? I say, rather than behaving like machines or drones, we need to behave more like cavemen, or - dare I say it - children.

We need to make exercise more interesting, varied, fun, simple, and maybe even a little risky. Lately, instead of a typical slog on the road for an hour, I like to go for trail runs. I'm lucky in that from home I can quickly run to Moose Hill or nearby Town conservation land. I'm not ready for barefooting yet (Plus it's February in New England.) and I don't have any of the new minimalist footwear yet (I'm still a little skeptical about that, too.), so I focus on landing more on my mid-foot and less on my heel.

As I move across soft and variable trail surfaces, I notice that my foot doesn't hurt nearly as much as it does on pavement. Moving through the woods, I watch the terrain in front of me and try to let my body flow with the landscape; moving left and right, up and down. I start to feel like a wild animal moving gracefully through the forest. (OK, I'm an overweight mid-50's guy with a bad foot and a bad shoulder, but endorphines are powerful drugs that help me hallucinate.) As I run, I scan my surroundings for playthings: A log on the ground makes a good balance beam. A granite bolder lets me become king of the hill. A low-hanging tree branch is a good pull-up bar. I look for different ways to move my body: I bend to clear sticks from the path. If a log is in my way, I don't hesitate to hop over or crawl under. I look for stones to lift and throw. If I see a soft spot on the ground, I might do a somersault. The idea is to vary the movement and use many different muscles to stretch and strengthen the whole body, not to become over-trained in just one way. With all that running, bending, rolling, climbing, throwing and crawling, one should be ready for any physical challenge that comes up in everyday life.

There is also another component to my new thinking about exercise: Useful work. Let's be honest: Most of us have to exercise because we live cushy lifestyles and work at jobs where the biggest physical danger is the risk of a paper cut or maybe carpal tunnel syndrome. For most of us, exercise is actually something of a leisure time luxury. I don't think migrant farm workers go home at night and yell: "Let's go to the gym!" How about this: Next time it snows, don't call the plow guy. Get the kids off the couch and go out and shovel for an hour. Rather than agonize over the price of heating oil for next winter, go out and chop some firewood. Rather than drive to the Piggly Wiggly for your Pringles, hop on the bicycle and pedal over there for some whole wheat flower. Rather than hire a lawn service, push a mower for an hour a week. Better yet: Get out a spade and turn that lawn into a garden. We can find lots of way to get some exercise while doing something useful.

I like to find new ways of looking at our everyday world. I like to think about simple ways to make our lives and the world a little better. Born to Run is helping me to do that.

All That's On Offer

Once again, my mishugas makes life harder than it needs to be.

I was in Wally World early this week, not because I crave low, low prices, but because they and their ilk have managed to eliminate just about all the competition for miles around. I don't make a special trip there, it's on my route for other errands I routinely make and I pop in about once a month to pick up a few odds and ends. In a perfect world, I'd never darken the door of this evil empire, but I'm no hero and I try to avoid tokenism and martyrdom. Besides, places like this won't be around much longer, but that's a different story.

I was looking for some rubber sink mats, the kind that go on the bottom of a porcelain kitchen sink so it doesn't get all scratched up during pot scrubbing. A simple thing, right? In America, more often than not these days, when we go to buy a simple item, we are often overwhelmed with a blizzard of choices, but on this day I faced a different problem.

I found what a first glance looked like just what I was after: a plain, inexpensive, rubber sink mat. But, wait! What's this? The mats were treated with something called "Microban." I didn't spend a bunch of time studying the miraculous benefits of this marvel of modern chemistry. I didn't want it and the entire line of rubber and plastic kitchen accessories on sale in this store were from the same supplier and they were all treated with this anti-microbial chemical. No untreated product was on offer.

I'm proud to say my local doctor is enlightened and not easily swayed by the pleas of sniffling patients for drugs. I know many docs will blithely prescribe antibiotics at the first sign of a cold, and I'd venture a guess that the vast majority of Americans wouldn't think twice about taking antibiotics for a cold. But most colds are viral and antibiotics will do no good, and unnecessary drug-taking may well come back to bite us.

Likewise, antibiotics are fed to our food animals. Chickens and cattle are regularly fed all kinds of drugs, partly because they are so crowded together on factory farms that many would sicken and die as diseases swept through the vast poultry sheds and squalid feed lots. Also, animals fed a diet laced with chemicals grow faster and fatter and are more profitable. But what could all those drugs be doing to our world?

We seem to be facing wave after wave of childhood diseases and disorders today that were almost unheard-of when we were kids. ADD, ADHD, allergies, asthma, autism: you name it, and that's just the A's. What's going on? Perfect parents who have done all the right things for their precious darlings like to blame mercury in vaccines. I like to think that if we let kids be kids and didn't program and schedule all the fun out of life so they can all get into Harvard, kids would be a lot more relaxed and better behaved. But maybe we're doing something else, too. Maybe our kids are too clean and our germs are too strong.

We've been trained by modern science and commerce to believe that all germs are bad and should be exterminated. We've also been taught - at least for the past eight years - that evolution doesn't exist. Well, not all germs are bad, they can't all be killed anyway, and the ones that don't die will evolve and develop resistance to our weapons.

We try to raise our kids in sterile worlds where everything is scrubbed, sprayed and treated. Little bottles of hand sanitizer are everywhere. I think you can even buy entire kitchen countertops treated with some kind of germ-killing poison.

How many times do we hear a story about somebody who went into the hospital for some minor routine procedure only to be infected, consumed and killed by flesh-eating bacteria. Even multi-million-dollar NFL quarterbacks can go in for a little knee-scoping and wind up with a staph infection.

So, now we have the world's largest retailer selling only kitchen accessories that are biocide-enhanced. I'm not buying it. I'll keep my kitchen clean (If you can call it that.) the old-fashioned way with a little detergent and elbow grease. I embrace the friendly microflora that dwell happily in my sink, in my mouth and on my body. I want my gut to be an ecological wonderland. I want my soil to be a veritable Garden of Eden for worms, bacteria and fungi. I want us to keep our powder dry and save our miracles of modern medicine for fighting real diseases and not to make our Big Macs cheaper.

Crap. I did it again. Can't I even go to f-ing Walmart without getting all worked up. What time does the Super Bowl start?

Greetings from the Green Mountain State

This week I find myself in Burlington, Vermont. My wife is at a conference, so I sit alone in a motel room with a slow internet connection drinking cheap zin from a plastic cup.

This trip is bittersweet. The last time I was here was about 32 years ago. It was my first summer of research for my masters in forest soil science. I spent several weeks here digging soil pits and measuring trees along the Winooski River. I think back on those days and just shake my head. So much energy, work and enthusiasm; so little guidance and support. I know what it is to carry disappointment around.

While I on the subject of disappointment, when I first learned that we would be spending a few days at the University of Vermont, among the fist things that popped into my head were memories of the wonderful dairy bar at UVM. During that summer in 1976, I found every excuse possible to visit campus so I could get ice cream at the shop that, as I recall, was a mini-enterprise run by dairy science students. They milked the cows, made the ice cream and other wonderful dairy products, and ran the store. (At least in my idealized memory students did all those things, learning valuable skills along the way.) When I searched the web for direction to the shop, I learned instead that the shop was closed in 1995 when the building that housed it was torn down. It seems, the dairy bar was never reopened in a new location.

In my cynical, conspiracy-theory-prone brain, I saw local heroes Ben and Jerry giving a big donation to support the establishment of one of their shops in the new student center on the condition that the dairy bar not be reopened. More likely, no one on the staff wanted the hassle of running the store when it was easier to let a mega-corporation do it in return for some profits that could be exported to headquarters. Students don't want to learn that stuff any more anyway.

A little mild melancholy aside, we're having a great time. Burlington has a reputation of being a green, livable, walkable, bikeable city, and that seems true enough. The downtown is a fun mix of local color and national chain stores. Walkers and bikes are everywhere and a significant shopping street is for pedestrians only. From many places one can enjoy views of sea-like Lake Champlain, the Green Mountains to the east and the Adirondacks to the west.

But then, this is August. Biking probably isn't quite so much fun in January. I've also been reminded of another little problem that plagued me three decades ago: mosquitoes. With the lake, the river and it's wetlands and all kinds of ponds, puddles, swamps and bogs everywhere, this place has more mosquitoes than any place I've been - with the possible exception of Wisconsin. (I've never been to the arctic.) I recall how, when I was studying my floodplain soil pits so many years ago, one of the primary tasks of my assistant was to constantly swat my back with fern fronds to keep the bugs at bay.

So far, we've taken two wonderful bike rides. The first went in a big loop up north along Lake Champlain and a few of the big bays. We even crossed the river within sight of one of my old research areas. There are some great bike paths and a local cycling club (Local Motion) even runs a bicycle ferry service to shuttle cyclists across a cut in an old railroad causeway that now serves as a bike path. It looks like the old causeway was built on waste from marble quarries and a couple of artists have used the white rock as a stony medium; one painting a landscape and the other carving a huge jumping salmon.

Our other ride took us south to Shelburne Farms. This is a 1400-acre farm, historic site and environmental education center. For a few bucks, tourists can walk the grounds and imagine what the landscape used to look like. It's certainly beautiful, but obviously few working farms from the 19th century had the benefit of Frederick Law Olmsted doing the landscaping and Robert H. Robertson doing the building. This farm is more a museum than a working agricultural enterprise. I imagine more of its income comes from the exclusive inn on the property, tourist dollars and donations than comes from the delicious cheddar cheese they produce on site.

It's a good thing there are museums like this because the fabled Vermont landscape is fast disappearing under the blades of bulldozers. As we pedaled south of Burlington, we saw parcel after parcel of recently-farmed land being turned into subdivisions, condos and apartment complexes. I can't help but smirk and sneer as I see how often these developments are named after the things they have destroyed, with names like "Lakeview Farms." Of course now, the only farmer is the Orkin Man, and soon enough the only view will be of the three garage doors of the new mini-mansion across the street.

I can't help but think that the day will come when we wish that we could have those farms back and that a few more kids had worked at the dairy bar.

Even Starbux

No, it was not a nightmare. I was walking along Route 17 in Paramus, New Jersey. This is what a world looks like when people can imagine no life not totally ruled by the automobile. There are no sidewalks. This is not a limited access highway, but Jersey barriers separate northbound from southbound lanes and a pedestrian would literally risk life and limb to cross the road. To get to the other side, there is no choice but to get in the car and drive who-knows-how-far to the next overpass to reverse direction and then drive back.

On a short morning stroll to see what was around, what should I find but a Starbucks. A couple of doors down from the "Romantic Depot" porn shop and next to the plumbing supply warehouse was a recent incarnation of the once-thought-to-be-hip Seattle coffee cafe. Other than the sign outside and a hint of slightly nicer than average fixtures inside, there was nothing to differentiate this coffee outlet from a Dunkin Donuts or a McDonalds.

We have a Starbucks back home in Sharon, Massachusetts. It has become the focal point of our little town center. Friends rendezvous there and bicyclists begin and end rides there. Would-be high school hipsters hang out there. Business people meet there. Naturally, I would prefer some kind of funky locally-owned cafe, but for our struggling town center, a Starbucks is pretty cool.

Now, after about seven years, we get the news that the bean counters at headquarters are closing our Starbucks. There are two newer outlets nearby down on Route 1 (Our version of Route 17) that apparently get more business because automobile access is much better that will remain open.

Maybe I'm prone to romantic notions (In addition to those catered to by the likes of places like the Romantic Depot.), but I liked to think of Starbucks as the kind of place that would help build a community, a place for people who cared about their hometowns, a place for people to discuss the important issues of the day and form warm personal relationships. In my heart, I knew better. Starbucks is just another mega-corporation selling an illusion and focusing on the bottom line. If that means drive-up windows in Paramus, so be it.