The Purge

Before today’s post, two quick reminders about recent product reviews …

First, if you want your name in the hat for a $20 Soft Star coupon, leave a comment on this post right now. I’m assigning numbers and pulling one out of the hat on Monday night.

Second, the coupon code discount (R&R20) for 20% off Vivo Barefoot shoes ends on October 31st, so get going if you want to save a few dollars. I have an additional Vivo Barefoot announcement as well as a second shoe review, but I’m saving those for a later post.

For now, today’s entry should be a brief one …

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“ … And when it became clear that one side had to go, one side had to be purged. I did what I had to do.”
- Ben Linus, from season 3 of Lost


For as long as I’ve been a runner, I’ve been a packrat with my running shoes.

Once I’ve exceeded its recommended mileage life span, I’ll keep a pair of running shoes around the house for years afterward. Some I use for walking shoes; some are for hiking or mountain biking; others are set aside for yardwork. Some have very specific roles, such as mowing the grass or doing indoor chores, and others are available for general use – they sit in the cabinet by my front door for the times when I just need to throw something on my feet in a hurry before exiting the house.

The result, of course, is that I accumulate a lot of shoes.

However, since undertaking this whole barefoot experiment, I’m finding that the type of shoes I reach for nowadays are very seldom the super-cushiony, pronation- and motion-controlling stability models that I’ve used for decades. Instead, I seek out the minimal amount of shoe necessary for the task at hand.

I’m not yet sure what the endpoint of this barefoot awakening will be, but there’s one thing I know for certain: from this point forward, I’m a firm believer in the “less is more” philosophy of running shoes. Even when I eventually return to the high-mileage, high degree of difficulty trails of my favorite ultra courses, it will be with shoes that are as lightweight and low-profile as I can get away with.

Consequently, I recently realized that I had at least a dozen pair of shoes lying around that I would most likely never care to use again. As Ben Linus would say, it was clear that one side had to go. One side had to be purged.

One-half of the donation

Later that week, I rounded up all the old shoes I could find, stuffed them into two garbage bags, and hauled them over my shoulder like Santa Claus into my local running store's Reuse-A-Shoe bin. Dropping their weight off my body felt remarkably therapeutic, like when a drug addict finally flushes his pills down the toilet, or a porn addict burns his stash of magazines and videotapes (um … so I’m told). A small part of me wanted to seek out a 12-step group somewhere, to help guide me through the transitional uncertainty.

Maybe I’ll see the old shoes in another life, if they get reincarnated as an all-weather track somewhere, or as reused materials in a minimalist shoe a few years from now. Perhaps they’ll be given away intact to people who have far less means and far greater concerns to worry about than what’s covering their feet. Either way, I’m hopeful that somebody can put them to good use – but that somebody almost certainly won’t be me.

My name is Donald, and I’m a barefoot runner.