On her training runs through the streets of San Diego, Emilie Reas is reminded about once every mile by passersby that she is missing her shoes. In her most recent marathon, she counted more than 40 comments spectators and runners made about her bare feet — about one per kilometer.

Reas, 35, a neuroscientist at the University of California-San Diego, has been running for more than 20 years — since high school — and most of that time was spent in shoes.

But on Saturday, she'll toe the Grandma's Marathon start line just outside of Two Harbors and run 26.2 miles down Highway 61 to the finish line in Canal Park barefoot — across hot pavement, cobblestone and debris. To continue reading, please visit:...

10-20-30k race

25k run for me (20k announced, + 2k to join the race, 3k of "oups lost my way")
+378m
no chrono, open start from 9h30 to 11am
only local bio food and drink proposed during the race and after,
in the huge and unforgettable site of Floreffe abbey (some part of the 12 century)
a boarding school where I spent 4 terrible years...

yep, not easy to go back 30 years later in this place without remembering young scholarship time, but for this particular kind of event (no time recording, local bio food, and the marvelous landscape), i was ready (and had no choice: my wife registrated me last week).
first i thought of the 10k, but she encoded an optimistic 20k, a barefoot who finally ended to be a 25k for me...


after a parking adventure, i finally joint the start (was running) half an hour before the deadline, just in time...

After an unsuccessful pre-meeting with others the day before, I received confirmation of two other barefoot runners for the rocky, up and down slopes of Namur Citadelle Trail.

Christian P., from Belgium was gonna run 30 km full barefoot, myself (RV.), a nice but finally hard 15km, full barefoot, and Clément (C17) a 7,5km full barefoot (nice one, Clément started barefoot running few months ago !).

Due to different starting times for each distance, we couldn't start as a barefoot group. For the 15km more than 700 participants towed the place on the starting line. As usual, I placed myself at the back in order to avoid any disturbances or scrambling toes from shod ones.

After a...

Move over abdominal muscles, you are not the only core muscles in our body that need strengthening. At the recent American College of Sports Medicine annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, Irene S. Davis, Ph.D., PT, FACSM, FAPTA, FASB, professor in the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School and director of the Spaulding National Running Center shared her unconventional approach to treating plantar fasciitis and Achilles tendinitis which includes strengthening the foot core and spending more time barefoot.

“Our feet are amazing with their 26 bones, 33 joints, 20+ muscles and 4 layers of arch muscles and they play an important role in both static posture and dynamic activities,” she said during her...