Welcome To Natural Running!

PRELUDE

A QUEST AND A QUESTION “What’s holding me back.?”

For weeks, ever since I first saw the list of course participants for the upcoming Natural Running Course, I’d been in a state of eager anticipation. I was really looking forward to meeting up with this group.

I wasn’t prepared for meeting someone else deeply interesting: myself.

The group of people gathering together for this course form an awesome bunch. All of them are committed runners, each in their individual way. Together they bring to the course an extraordinary amount of running ‘lore’, of nous and plain good horse-sense about running. Amongst them is an author and commentator on running that I really respect and then,there is a young guy who has been helping with a scientific project in Kenya who I’m keen to quiz about key aspects of natural running. There are some naturally gifted runners and, as it turns out some highly emotionally intelligent individuals. It has the promise of some great chemistry, some interesting challenges and insights ahead.

I’ve had such a rich array of insights about natural running recently. I am fired up with some unique formulations to explore and present to this astute gathering of runners. It gets my juices flowing to work out ways of not just thinking about ones running but of ways to think into it. That’s my passion: to reveal insights into how to open into ones running body, to more fully inhabit it. I am up for the challenges of putting this over. New ways of exploring demand major shifts of attitude. They can challenge core beliefs about how to improve running form. Great- no pressure there then!

I like to lift my eyes to the bigger horizon, to explore how the running body fits into the wide panorama of evolution. I have a mission to dig down through strata upon strata of habitual and cultural overlay. Is it possible to get down to the bedrock.? Is it possible to reveal a natural stride unconditioned by the wearing of shoes? Consider all the strides ever taken in our (at least) 2.4 million year history. 99.9% of those strides have probably never had to adapt to the modern factory made shoe. And those strides have walked and run us to an extraordinary success in evolutionary terms. OK there is nothing wrong with big horizons, with a big mission like revealing a natural stride but one major interest that participants have in natural running centres around injury prevention. A key part of the interest runners have in natural running is to be injury free. Pain is indeed the gift that nobody wants!

The trouble is that it is now the Friday before the weekend course, a course trumpeted to be about injury free running and well…I have a bit of a problem…ah hum: I have injured both feet. The right foot I skewered on a rusty tent peg at the Solfest Music Festival the weekend before. The left foot I damaged a fortnight earlier. My dog will stop on a five-pence piece for an arresting smell, ( always blame the dog!) and forced me to side step off the path. My foot jammed down awkwardly on a (mercifully) round stone hidden under a tussock. I know exactly what I have done: I’ve badly sprained the tendons around the connection of Tibialis Posterior to the metatarsal. It sets up an inflammatory response between the cling-film like periosteum that lines the bone and the bone itself. By ankle twisting injury standards it’s no great shakes. Everything else about the foot and ankle works great but every time the foot rolls toward toe-off it twangs the damaged tendons. Ouch. Bottom line : I just can’t run. Walking is marginally even more painful.

So here’s the scenario: The next day a bunch of highly committed runners are gathering for a course on injury free natural running and well… here’s me, hardly a great advert for barefoot running: both feet are crippled. That is certainly pulling me down from those bigger horizons. In fact my movement horizons have narrowed dramatically. That’s not quite all: to add to the anxiety my mother with advanced senile dementia has fallen through the floor she recently flooded. Time for any grand plans and preparation is severely curtailed.

I step gingerly on the treadmill. C’ mon running is often about penetrating, pushing through pain. I am absolutely determined to push my foot through the pain of the rolling action to toe-off. Oh dear, it works so superbly normally, a sure.swift action of amazing tensile strength. It can take me flowingly over rocky terrain- very impressive. And I’m proud to think I’ve unearthed a missing 3^rd dimension to the foot action. This twin opposed spiral action of the foot winds and unwinds with enormous power. It reveals that what we conventionally call pronation and supination are more than a two dimensional rocking action but a superb 3D spiralling twist. A spiral action that furthermore can be seen as beautifully connecting from head to toe. It’s a great and insightful theory. However in my ‘Laboratory-of-One’ approach to natural running it is vital that I can “walk the talk”, that I can demonstrate. I aspire to be a living demonstration of a natural stride in action. I am not a bit comfortable with “talking the walk”- infact I’m now wishing I hadn’t quite tough on those who do!

Something that normally works so superbly, a source of pride and wonder, a source of amazing endorphin fuelled highs, now simply- hurts like hell,

I step off the mill. The ankle twinges painfully. I look in the mirror at that 64 year old who has recently started squatting in my face. My face reflects the complex “ball” of pain that I’m caught up in. The most painful aspect is the pricking at prodding at my Pride, at my reputation. I’m thinking, despairingly, does Pride really come before the Fall, because that bloody fall seemed to have come before my wounded and injured Pride. I ask myself, what am I so desperately trying to make happen here. I am determined to force my injured foot through a range of action so that it can “show-off” it’s usual superb action. But there’s a new set of conditions in the wretched ankle, a damaged set of tendons. I am angry and disappointed, resentful. And I’m determined to muscle through the pain come what may. All this is cattle-prodding me to get on in the drastically limited time available, all in the in the hope that it might warm-up and ease.

The injured foot is sullenly having none of it!

Looking at my reflection with eyes full of worry and self pity when, out of the blue comes a menthol fresh, cool clear question. It just drifted into my head:

“WHAT”S HOLDING YOU BACK?”.

The question only fuels my mounting anger and frustration..

Why of course it’s the injuries!. Why did they have to happen just now. Why is my time and attention being pulled away by my mother’s tragic situation.

Oh no no, the question is not going away that easily and it comes back again: coolly

“WHAT”S HOLDING YOU BACK?”.

I’m tearing my hair by now. Look isn’t it bleedin’ obvious that without the injury and my mother’s plight I’d be sailing full of confidence into the workshop I’ve so been looking forward to.

If this is the still, small voice of Conscience, then its neither still nor small and it seems to have a terrier like tenacity: “. Crystal clear and insistent it comes again

WHAT”S HOLDING YOU BACK?”

Then- BREAKDOWN. Like stepping off a crazy travellator, everything now stops and the whole prideful, painful ball of suffering just falls apart, disintegrates. And rather than feeling broken I sense myself breaking through somehow. I start to realize that what’s holding me back is this hurtling and hurting meteor of Pride. This has had me trying to force, strain and push my foot to do something it usually does superbly.

In a forehead smiting way now I get it!

Pride does indeed come before the Fall: The ability that I’ve cultivated to run barefoot over rocky ground has become an identity. That identity has been challenged and severely shaken. The dogged persistence of the question “WHAT”S HOLDING YOU BACK?” has guide me eventually to an insight and a truth: it was the whole ball of hurt pride and associated suffering that was holding me back. I had identified with those feelings, screamed for pity and found just grounds, evidence for feelings of despair. In the moment of breakthrough I stepped off the travellator and DISIDENTIFIED. Where moments before there was the desperate , cattle-prodding, straining, striving pushing of the aptly named FORCE of Habit, there is now stillness, insight and hope.

I’ve entered a very humble, vulnerable and opened out state .

I wholly embrace and accept the injuries. In fact they have given me all the preparation I will ever need to deal compassionately with my Mum’s tragic decline. It is all the preparation needed to communicate genuinely with the group of people I am about to meet who will essentially demand from me not puffed up pride and ego but the authenticity that is the ground of any real teaching. After all I call these courses “Crossing the Line”. That insistent question had. thankfully hauled me screaming across that line to a remarkable insight .

Like a stick of sea -side rock “WHAT’S HOLDING YOU BACK” will run through the centre of this course and open up some real and practical possibilities, amongst other things, how to improve running form. As I settled into this state I had a feeling of deep privilege that I was able to pass on a real Teaching.

What sense I can make of this goes something along these lines:

The hole I had skewered through the right foot and the injured tendons on the right ankle are real. The cascade of ego-driven fear, anxiety and despair are not real but mind manufactured limitations that were holding me back- and how!. The holding back works at multiple levels. They centre around attachments that I have become caught up in. But what was to be made very plain in the next few hours was the degree to which I had massively interfered by pushing and forcing my foot to work in the usual way. From the instant of the moment of breakthrough, I simply let go of the limitations of all of this. It just fell away from me. In no way could I get puffed by what was happening. Letting go and leaving myself alone in this way enabled the genius of my evolved support system to fire up WHUMPF like a huge and powerful boiler. Delighting in what it does so superbly it rapidly established a workable set of complex alternative kinesthetic flow lines to find ways around the new set of damaged conditions. The injuries seemed like rocks in the stream. The support system established ways to re-direct kinesthetic flow lines like water flowing around the rocks. What had previously been terrible obstacles, stumbling blocks to pride and ego were now revealed as gifts that opened me up to precious and humbling insights.

In all of this, in no way does the pain “miraculously” disappear. But there is something ’super-natural” going on and it is not in the other-worldly sense we usually use this word, but nature ‘souping ‘ itself up to fully do what it has evolved to do: to heal, repair and renew. The pain of the injuries become an integral part of the adaptation and healing., an intense sensation flagging up that I was being looked after- cared for. It is true nobody wants it, but for sure it is indeed a gift! Rapidly I was able to run on it again within hours, the same care that came from a sense of the injuries being cared for. Soon it was opening out moves that hours before seemed impossible . As things opened out came a return of the endorphins, harbingers of hope and optimism and gratitude!. Naturally I want to celebrate this., to emanate it and let it suffuse through the course.

All told this sense of stepping off the escalator, the stepping back, the disidentification with pride opened to an ineffable state of vulnerability and softness and created a nourishing acceptance of contingencies, of injury and pain. It continues to reconnect me to a child-like sense of wonder at the extraordinary process that grew me safely from fertilized ovum to a foetus, from a baby to a child, from a child to a man and the little bit of growth that took place as I stepped despondently off that running machine. I recall that all the ego part of me that I call “I” could do was to fight tooth and nail with the insistent “WHAT”S HOLDING YOU BACK” questioning. So could I take any credit?

No more than I could get puffed up because my liver works so well!

What if, in a parallel universe there were no injuries, no suffering of a dear demented soul. What if puffed up with pride and in full sail I had strutted my stuff flowing over those rocks, showing off what feet can really do. Might that have buttressed the walls of an identity. made it less likely that I’d confront someone deeply interesting before this course started -myself.

INTRODUCTION

A MIND EXPERIMENT

Entering the mind space of a Natural Runner

Imagine a pill that would give you the most extraordinary psychedelic experience: It transforms you into the mind-space of your ancestor from 1.5 million years ago. The chances are that we might even share that ancestor. We could go back even further to 3 million years and our ancestor would probably have the same brain in his cranium as you and me.

How would it be? All the senses would explode like a catherine wheel into full operation: sight, sounds, smells, and most vivifying of all – the body sense. The body sense is the core sense from which all the other tele-receptors, eyes, ears and nose derive. You are totally alert, fully awake, ready for action. Your 'thinking cap' (neo-cortex) is fully engaged with the senses and the body sense in particular. You think on your feet – with your feet. You look, scent, listen with your whole self, your body being totally poised alert and 'all ears'.

Short of a few marks in the the sand nothing is ever recorded. Our sense of memory is startlingly different. No more a repository or store-house, memory now resembles a kind of dream-like walk along the ragged sea shore of the present moment. Bits of flotsam and jetsom wash-up on the shore line to become immediately embodied in the total experience of the moment melding past and future into a dream-like stream of consciousness.

A completely awake hyper-vigilant alert state is the bedrock of your moment by moment survival. Your ancestral brain has the capacity for language but your relationship to words and language is radically different. Your language is thoroughly action orientated (non-conceptual). Remember nothing is written down or recorded. All know-how and information is passed through the generations by word-of-mouth. Myths, stories, oral traditions and rituals are powerful and magical ways of predicting and shaping the future. Words and language are vibrant and wholly tied to the planning of strategic, usually co-operative future action. This action based mind-space wholly enmeshes language and memory into the body sense/sight/sound/smell complex. Words have a dreamlike energy and magic and are wholly synchronised into the continuous process of planning and shaping future action. Words carve out and shape the future.

Words form the essential bonds that hold together a small band of hunter-gatherers. Our modern very fixed and set ego boundaries would now become much more fluid. Any sense of your self as an individual separate entity is now much less solid. What matters crucially is the survival of the group. Qualities of forebearance, empathy, comradeship, shelf-sacrifice may well be more developed in this ancestral mind set.

Doubtless there might be many other intriguing features we might experience on this psychedelic trip. Our modern brain though remains the same basic structure but it is 'wired' in a completely different way. The conceptual detached objective mind space we so often occupy has no place in the 'wiring' of our ancestral brain. Nothing is written down. Even, the root of the word, de-scribe or de-scription means to write down which puts experience into a passive, past tense.

There are a number of key features that distil out of our LSD trip into the mind space of our ancestor.

1. The experience of being fully and vigilantly awake and present moment centred.

2. An extraordinary full and complete enmeshing of the thinking gear with the body sense/sensory complex.

3. This intensely physical, thinking-in-action connection to the body manifest itself in an energy of words to shape directly future action

4. The past, memory is similarly a much more fluid, imaginative dream like flow, not a bit like how our modern brain 'stores' memories in a conceptual repository.

If our scientifically validated 2.4 million history as a distinct species Homo sapiens sapiens were a book with 1000 words per page then we start to write down our human experience about half way down the fifth to the last page. Writing is discovered around 3,500 BC in Sumer. It takes 4,000 years, until our lifetime in fact for literacy to become a well nigh universal human feature. This process, the alpha-betisation of the mind takes place in the same brain as our pre-literate ancestors. It radically transforms it. The transformative potential is our modern civilization. The 'pros' of the transformation are well and rightly celebrated. The 'cons' of the process are largely unknown and unexlored.

The workshop opens. I have these thoughts in my mind. They express a key concern that in our modern lives our thinking caps (our heads) have become disengaged from our kinesthetic (body) sense. Unlike our ancient ancestor we are rarely in the vivifying moment but we languish in some past memory or crave some future state. We have entered a weird trance-like mechanical sleep. By comparison to our remote ancestor, we have become mechanical in the many sense of the word. Ours is a mechanical age. We instruct machines to undertake the actions and increasingly our thinking becomes remote and detached from the action. We detach and step outside of our experience. We objectify our feelings, our emotions. We philosophise about love and truth. Such things for our not-too distant ancestors (e.g. Heraclitus) were active, process orientated things by which you lived your life more fully: the process of loving, the process of truing (actively bringing yourself into integrity). Bear in mind that all learning for our remote ancestors was done in the context of the action. You learned to make a bow and arrow by making a bow and arrow. You learned to plough by following the plough. All this has radically changed in an eye-blink of evolutionary time. Increasingly we sit at our computers and programme (instructing) them to carry out the actions. Systematically our schooling system sets about detaching the 'thinking cap'' from the body sense. We learn by being instructed detached and remote form the action. We are, for most of the 2,400 pages of the Human story powerfully kinesthetic creatures who have an exceptional brain that can think in action and a language capacity primarily designed to shape future strategic (and usually co-operative) action. Compared to the kinesthetically vibrant and rich play of our ancestral childhood we now take a human child whose whole cascade of instincts is to see the world as a gymnasium to turn cartwheels to having upside down fun, to skip around on, and we sit this child down and systematically put it through a process that numbs and dumbs down the body sense. Tacitly it continually inculcates, through continuous repetition that your eyes and ears are the key portals through which knowledge and information must pass more or less completely detached from any real action: “Sit still, pay attention. Look at the blackboard, listen to the teacher” and above all the classic and berating cry of the modern teacher: “No running!!”.

Our action, the way our bodies move has become like the machines that we take to be made in our own image. We analogize, liken our brains to the computers we have created. We even think our human memory should work in the same way as the computing machine.

Our actions compared to the actions of our remote re-literate ancestors, have become mechanical. Our thinking gear has desynchronized from our bodies. Our heads have gone of somewhere else – into the past or the future. While we are 'off' away in our head-trips, the body moves onto 'hold'. I t is put on the back-burner. It moves into the Past tense. The word 'posture' derives from the Latin word, 'ad-positum'. Posture is the past participle. It means, 'has been place'. Most of the time, while our 'thinking caps' are elsewhere our bodies are on automatic pilot. We act and behave as if we are on the assembly line. This is so beautifully encapsulated in the early and iconic silent movie made by Charlie Chaplin as he comically (tragically?) tries to mould his action to the assembly line.

All these ruminations are in my head when as I open the workshop, I suggest a metaphor. Our immediate future opens up like a gameboy screen with a road that perpetually splits into two routes. We perpetually stream down one route – the mechanical one:WE RUN MECHANICALLY. The aim of the workshop is to first and foremost stop the flow of traffic down the mechanical road the route well travelled. Like repositioning the points on the railway we want to initiate a flow down the road less travelled. This will enable the Thinking Gear to re-synchronize once more with the body. In this way we might begin to run creatively. There's a number of key things about this invitation to re-route the traffic onto the road less travelled, the road to the present moment.

Most of all you don't have to install any new hardware to achieve this your simply need, here and now, to do no more than connect into it, plug-in. It is after all the same brain as our remote ancestor! If this starts to work, if we can shift the points a number of things become apparent, that while our head are 'off' somewhere in the past or future, we miss the extraordinary dynamo of energy and vitality that is the life we have within us now. Life exists not in a recreated past or an imagined future. What we discern in our distant past and future are fictions. The only real possession we have is where our remote ancestor lived in the now-here which is in fact nowhere. Well – that's the invitation. It is a Big Call. Are we going to achieve this re-routing. Can we experience creative running ahead of the mechanical (reactive running). Well what holds us back?

SCAFELL BAREFOOT 29 September 2011

29th. September 2011 will break all records. It's the hottest September day on record. In the strange and wonderful micro-climate of the Lake District the summit of Scafell Pike will have its own peculiar Lake District weather cocktail, a gale force fog!

I leave Cockley Beck early, before anyone's around to make comments about my barefeet. The things people say are shaped by their own experience,

“That must hurt”,

“I bet that's painful”.

Only a rare individual will think : ”There goes someone following their Bliss”.

Later I'm to meet just such a person. But for now I can settle into the rhythm of the Mosedale trail. It is extraordinary still. The only sound is the tumbling waters of Mosedale Beck. It is my 64^th birthday and I'm planning to run to the summit of the highest mountain in England. For a 25 year long barefoot runner the summit and particularly the ridge that leads to the summit is an ultimate challenge. There is no path as such, only a sequence of cairns in a chaos of haphazard rocks formed of Silurian slate, all as sharp as hell.

I love early mornings alone like this and I wrap around myself the beautiful tapestry of the Lake District. I've used the occasion of my 60^th birthday to run 60 miles around the Lake District coast. I've also run part of this route on a few past birthdays as part of a favourite run from home up to Keswick. The Lake District is so fondled, handled, admired that the scenery sometimes seems embarrassed by its own rugged beauty. From the air you see a criss-crossing of footpaths that scar the landscape. The delicate, yet rugged ecology of Scafell is seriously challenged by the boots that pound up and down the mountain. At least I have no shoes to scuff and scar the mountain. I console myself that my feet and my light running action will not leave any great trace behind me.

I carry no shoes with me on this day. I reckon it will maintain a focus. I know someone who does forestry work with a chain saw without shoes. He reckons that in his vulnerable barefeet he will be more careful than individuals who wear safety gear. They trim down their safety margins, up the risk.

It is perfect in the early morning. It is actually warm and so still that I just want to merge and move into the stillness and into the beauty. I can see Scafell from my sitting room at home in the Duddon Estuary. For years and years it has beckoned me to run it barefoot. How does that saying go?

“The only things worth doing are the things they say you can't do.?’’

Ore Gap is like a dip in the rugged skyline between Bow Fell and Esk Hause. I've tackled the trail barefoot up to Ore Gap on other occasions. I know that at this point the trail starts to disappear in to boggy marsh so I stream hop along the meandering beck. Now I’m moving up using Ore Gap like the sights on a rifle. I aim myself up, toward the ridge which is to be my ultimate challenge.

Each stride modulates and adapts itself to the terrain. I love this. Allowing the feet to fall, so that the knee glides over the ankle while the thigh drops out of the hip and connects across and thorough my open back and into the swinging action of the arm. This is freedom. This is liberation. This is my birthday treat! I've had no chance to prepare this run – none whatsoever. The possibility to get away from a desperate and tragic situation has only opened up the day before.

As I move along I think about the fact that at 7.30am, exactly at this time 64 years ago, I came into the world and the trajectory of my life began. The individual who gave me , the ultimate gift of life is now in a tragic, heart rending plight. For my soon to be 90 year old Mum, time has fallen apart, degenerated. Over the last year the fabric of time started to become ragged and full of holes. Now it has crumbled altogether. As my feet move effortlessly over tricky terrain they seem to be part of an extraordinary sylvan thread continuously spun out as the present moment merges into the immanent future. The fabric of the time/space continuum for me is intact. I do these runs barefoot to feel connected, to become a part of landscape, a part of life. But for Mum this has fallen apart. Her bone structure is not at all frail for someone of 90. Mum has none of the usual rambling short-term memory forgetfulness. But without the thread that spins to keep time and space together she is continually falling over. If only the 'hole' where time and space used to be allowed her to fall gracefully into the present moment. No, instead she is trapped in existential terror. For months the way that time and space spread themselves out so familiarly in a calendar have tortured her. She is totally unable to work out what is happening next, what to move next.

Quite how Mum managed to survive a recent fall down our slate stone stairs will forever be a mystery to me . Her falls seem to be due to an inability to be able to sequence actions. After a week of respite care Mum is desperate to be back in her much cherished independence in her chalet home. The prospects are bleak. The dilemmas for me seem endless. For months now I've been like the fireman on Red Watch, ready to slide down the pole in a fraction of a second for the next emergency The arrival of my brother form Australia has made possible this window of opportunity, my birthday treat.

So here I am celebrating what me and my Mum achieved 64 years ago almost to the minute. The silver filament spins itself out to thread together the moment by moment experience of the ever changing demands of the Mosedale trail. Wow! these feet came into this world 64 years ago and they feel so strong and sure. I have no foot protection. Balance had better be superb. If the foot slips and has to do something ballistic, such as an out of control slip, it could spell disaster. But I have no thought of that, just an intense focus and that extraordinary magnetic pull mountains have as they draw you onwards and upwards – until there's no more 'up' to go not anywhere in England at least!

This 'borrowed day' is the greatest gift for my birthday. And the gliding rhythm, the stillness, the emerging freshness of the morning give a sense of wholeness and connection After all the whole of my support structure has to open out to the full to cope with this sort of terrain. I really love this – the sense of edginess as the present moment merges into the immanent future. The sureness, the seeming solidness of this is in stark contrast to the desperate plight of the partner who brought me to the gift of life 64 years ago. It's not that I'm cocky and confident. It's more that while I'm moving, spinning out the space time continuum in this way I am simply without doubt. Doubt cannot enter into the performance of all this. That's why it is such a joy, such a celebration-

“Get your Thinking Cap on”. “C’mon put your back into it, lad”.

I can hear my long dead Dad words as I get into my flow. Yes, that’s it! What I get out of this is the demand that my Thinking Cap must be be wholly syncro-meshed into my moving body. Yes, this is indeed the joy of the present moment but it is also something more than that. It is the thread that spins into the immediate future that carries the spark- the joy.

The terror in my Mum's eyes haunts me as she becomes trapped in the moment with no 'line' or thread to connect it to the next moment . The joy for me seems to be in the ease with which each moment phases into the immanent future, in the responsiveness, the sense of belonging to the landscape, in the finest grain detail as the foot falls to the ground . Indeed this seems to be where the wholeness lies, in the sense of 'threading' integrity through each step. Out of integrity comes a high level of focus, that mindfulness, that bodyfullness, that one-pointed single-mindedness. It reveals, as it always does, a rich sense of joy, of connection, of love, belongingness, a will to really live.

Why am I doing this when it’d clearly be easier with some foot protection?

It’s true that I’m continually surprised by what the human foot can do. But I’m equally fascinated by the human will. I’ve worked out there are two windows on the human will; the willing and the wilful. These two three letter suffixes –ing and –ful that tack themselves onto the word “will” beautifully encapsulate the two windows. The ‘willing’ and the ‘wilful are two aspects of the will and sit juxtaposed, close together . Yet, paradoxically to get from one to the other is a giant leap, one that needs a magnificent exertion. Running a trail barefoot such as this makes this paradox stark. If I try to push and force things I end up in wilful frustration. If I leave myself alone then there is a willing joy.

“Isn’t that painfull’? is probably the most common thing people say to me.

As the stones get sharper I realise that my relationship to pain is really quite different when I’m in a state of willing joy. Pain reveals itself as the gift no one wants and right now it’s the sentinel and guide that shapes each footfall.

Hey! it’s so great just to 'Go with the Going'. In race-horse terms' the Going' describes the underfoot terrain: “The Going was firm at Kempton Park today”. Of course, the horse being a good animal always 'Goes with the Going'. And, so now must I. Here the going is soft so I need to firm up. Here the going is hard, I might need to soften more. Sections of trail are fast, others sections slow. All this adds to a developing sense for me of the slender, delicate yet extraordinary tensile strength of the woven thread that connects space and time together as one stride integrates with the next. Occasionally glimpses of heaven and eternity are revealed. The breaking of this thread is the Hell that my Mum has descended into. The beads of experience now fall scattered and shattered on the floor of her brain.

“Go with the going.”.

“Wherever you go, there your are.”

“ Certain of mind, certain of step”.

“Pride has a pinch”.

I’m just ahead full of jingles and soundbites as I run along. There is such a solace in the solitariness of the early morning and in the mindful/bodyful demands of the place and of the occasion and all it represents.

I reckon I love my fellow man as well as most but I spend so much quality time in such close and intimate proximity to my fellow man. I touch people for a living. It's who I am. What I do. Damn it ! I need this solitude. It is my soul food, my nourishment. I cherish the gift of today more than any other previous birthday occasion run. At this level of focus “certain of mind, certain of step” it is clear to me that the opposite of the aloneness I now experience is loneliness. A loneliness that will so surprise me before the day is out.

Everything is working really smoothly. Recently I've been working on allowing my foot to open up fully, to roll up and make the smooth arcing move that actually lifts most of the foot off the floor simply, as a result of a release that moves through the linkages from head to toe. I'm probably the only person on the planet who gets excited by this incredible feat of bio-engineering. This action is an essential preparation for the moment of change of support, when my foot leaves the floor. When the right preparation is allowed to happen, change of support becomes no more than a tweak that deftly lifts the heel toward the rump. This also forms the essential preparation for a free controlled falling movement out of the opposite ankle . It will also allow the body to ease forward in a way that ensures that the knee drops freely out of the hip and back. The knees and feet stay resilient, soft and springy, prepared to absorb and cushion at the moment of foot fall. This head-to -toe integrity opens up the support structure such that it can adapt swiftly to unexpected contingencies. Shoes protect the foot from such unexpected scuffs and slippages. Without shoes I must maintain a continuous relaxed alert vigilance to minimise the possibility of damage. “Mindfulness is bodyfulness”. It's all about leaving yourself alone so that the Thinking Cap can engage fully and create an animal like grace in movement.

I'm going with the Going and I'm going well. It could be a good title for a song!

It's steep but not rocky. About 200m before Ore Gap where a cairn mark the ridge above Angle Tarn there is low cloud. Visibility is down to 2 or 3 metres. As I hit the ridge I begin the wonder whether attempting the summit in these conditions is really such a great idea. I've no back- up support team, no shoes, and no mobile phone signal. The GPS system is lying in bits back in the camper van, the batteries having corroded so badly that the apparatus is kaput. After all, this run has not been set up with sponsorship for charity – no trumpets have been blown. So why not move along the ridge in the mist to the point where tracks cross and then drop south into the Esk Valley. This would make a delightful round. It’s a lovely autumn day bathed in warm sunshine down in the valley. The decision is made. I am abandoning the summit attempt. I pick my way along the ridge and when I meet the criss crossing of paths I make my descent back down into the Esk Valley. I keep glancing up to the blanket of cloud when the Scafell summit lies wrapped in grey tissue paper cloud. It's so beautiful, like the Garden of Eden in the Esk Valley and so unbelievably still having just experienced the gale force fog on the ridge 1000feet above me.

I go slower and slower and eventually I stop. I seem to be hoping that he cloud might suddenly lift in the rapid way that weather conditions change on mountains. I lay on my back. Listen to the stream. Watch the sky. Merge into the stillness and the solitariness. I look again at where the summit should be.

It's a sign for sure.

The cloud lifts and there's the summit in all its glory, beckoning and taunting me by degrees in the same way that it has been doing for years when I look out of my study window. It seemed to me like a birthday gift freshly unwrapped from the grey tissue paper wrapping of the cloud.

It's a sign for sure.

It has been decided. …

… I'm already up and off picking my way up the tributary of the Esk that will lead me back up to the ridge. The unwrapping of the gift was only temporary but I am back-on and focussed. Certain of mind, certain of step and the Going is good. Aside for a bit of a rocky scrabble by a waterfall the Going is soft.

There's no track as such along the ridge upto the summit but the sharp stones are scuffed and polished from thousands of boots. There are cairns at regular intervals. The low visibility is no big issue. Its a bit like stream hopping leaping form rock to rock. You get into the way of it. Occasionally the mist evaporates revealing the way ahead. The closer to the summit the stronger the magnetic pull

I meet a young couple who are intrigued to find someone in bare feet materialising out of the mist before them. We have a friendly interchange.

“It's my birthday treat” I explain.

They think: ”Couldn't you just have a party”.

Again the mist parts momentarily revealing the very steep rocky ascent to the summit. The curtain of mist drops again.

At the top I don't feel in the least like yelling “Yes!” and punching the air. There's maybe a half dozen people clustered around the round rocky shelter at the summit. Wrapped in the mist, wrapped in their own preoccupations, no one seems interested or even particularly notices the bare feet. I guess I'd hoped for a friendly interchange, may be a photo opportunity. No worries. I make sure I get to the very topmost point and then I head on down leaving the slightly desultory atmosphere at the top.

The summit pulls you up magnetically and I have done it- really done it. It is only a little after midday. If anything doing down on this terrain is trickier than going up. I've been completely focussed on getting to the top. Now I have to get down safely. 200 meters from the summit I stop to brush a sharp stone from my foot. I've lost any vestige of celebration. I set off again. The mist clears momentarily. I can't believe my eyes. I am heading back toward the summit 180 degrees in the opposite direction to the one I thought I was heading in.

The mist envelopes me again. It in fact is only a moment of temporary disorientation. Between the onset of a kind of sea-sick feeling and the voice that called out to me from the mist was no more than a handful of seconds. However in those few moments something seismic seemed to shift inside me. The centre of gravity in me somehow shifts and tilts the balance away from solitariness and toward interdependence- a need for company. I am experiencing a raw terror. In a flash I've dropped from being “certain of mind, certain of step” into a gripping vulnerability, a terrifying fear of falling. The solitariness, the aloneness has turned into a desperate loneliness. I am orphaned in a universe where the ground and the sky, north, south, east and west have become a grey formless mass. All sense of ambition and achievement has gone along with anything that seemed to give ground to existence. Perhaps this is how it is as you leave the womb and enter the field of gravity for the first time . There is one key difference however: I am still the fleet of foot, focussed individual, confident and confident in my physical prowess, still the individual who has lived the dream, achieved a peak experience. Of course I have a map and compass. I can position to within 200meter. Also the gale force fog has blown consistently from the south-west all morning. I'm not even physically exhausted. A little later I will realise that I am experiencing something of the terrifying existential hell that my mother has descended into.

I'm so afraid of falling I can't move.

Mountains can do this to you: Flip you in a moment from feeling indomitably large to being implacably small. My head is hung low, my crooked right index finger touching my upper lip. This is the exact posture my long dead father would adopt when he was anxious or lost in thought. For a long time I’ve been holding it all together, trying to tie together the frayed and broken of the thread for Mum. Now I seem to have become an integral part of that suffering, vulnerability and tumultuous doubt. The dying that is such an integral part of living seems a very real possibility. It is not so much that my thread has broken as it has for Mum, it is more that momentarily is has ceased to spin...

… a voice comes strong and clear from out of the mist:

“Are you alright?”.

As these words echo out of the mist it is as if for all the world the ground slides back under my feet. The sky slots back into place. The disembodied voice from the mist has fixed my position on the inner existential landscape. As I find my bearings I feel like an infant who has lost his parents and just found them again.

“Are you alright?”.

In fact Joe's actor trained, well projected voice was not directing his question to me at all but to his companion, Eric, who is getting over a recent knee problem. Together they are picking their way down and like me they’ve lost the cairned track on the ridge.

“Yes, Oh yes. I'm fine really”. I say initially to the mist and then to the emerging figure of Joe, Eric is a few paces back, map and compass in hand.

I must have cut an odd figure in this posture of despair, my barefeet on the rocks in the swirling mist. In a few moments Joe will mention this posture saying he wished that he’d photographed it. But for now his actors sensibilities are engaged, trying to read the character.

Joe and Eric are among the special and rare breed of individuals who see my barefoot exploits as someone following their bliss and Boy!... are they welcome to me right now! Far better than a magnum of champagne being cracked open on Scafell, they give me such a boost, a real tonic. Joe is so enthusiastic about the barefoot explorations and so congratulatory about my summit achievement.

We are a bit lost, both a bit off track. But we are lost and off-track together. Joe and Eric are wanting to travel south west to Wasdale where they are staying and I want to go south-east to Cockley back. But what the hell we can be lost together and we split the difference between south west and south east and, head roughly south together enjoying our new found companionship.

As we pick a way down it isn’t long before the earlier terrifying spectre of Death has turned into a light hearted banter between us.; What if we were irrevocably lost on the mountain.

What if we had to eat each other?

Who would we eat first?

Well you can’t eat me ‘cos it’s my birthday!

Joe and Eric are not so convinced about this suggesting that it’d be quite rounded, Yeah perfect in fact- to sacrifice yourself on the same date that you were born. Eric was thought to be a bit grisley…..And so on and on as we made our way down, levity growing out of gravity, the magic of the laughter of friends.

At one point Joe will turn to me and say intently:

“It’s been a big day for you , John hasn’t it – a big squeeze”. Something significant has indeed shifted, easing me toward the interconnected of all human life . I am more open to seek help as the threads fray.

Dropping out of the low cloud is like descending into heaven. Our companionable southerly direction has dropped us down into the Esk Valley. A section of the Esk was my version of Paradise in my youth. We amble along a perilous goat track high above what I call the Fourteen Pools plunge, a series of idyllic waterfalls and clear pools.

By now Joe and Eric are miles from Wasdale but for the gift of their good company I will gladly take them in the van to Wasdale. It’s a hairy journey over the Hardknott pass… what the hell.

Life has become a great adventure again.

Considering I run almost exclusively barefoot it's paradoxical that I'm becoming something of an expert on shoes. I'm constantly being asked to rate the latest brands. Recently someone was telling me that when they were in the Running Shop buying some Nike Free's the salesman explained that the latest version comes without a tongue, in fact he added every time they bring out a new version there's less shoe but the price goes up. So in the end you just get the Nike logo tatooed and there you have it the shoe with ultimate barefoot feel.

So with my growing expertise reviewing shoes, I've decided to think of a trend, “The Feet”, that come to you from AltogetherBut.com. Here's my review.

Feature: Foot gear

Comment: 'Altogether But Co Ltd.' bring you their latest product, “The Feet”.

Rating: A small grouse but – hey - with a production run that runs into billions why can't they provide model numbers!

Feature: Colour

Comment: Colour range is “The Feet's” poorest feature. Mine are slug-white in winter turning to lobster red in summer. The react-to-light feature is great but too slow.

Rating: 01/10

Feature: Size and fitting

Comment: Unique: One 'all' fits any size. Fitting superb – wouldn't know you had it on!

Rating: 10/10

Feature: Weight

Comment: Light as they come. Connecting elastic medium between struts stronger than mild steel.

Rating: 10/10

Feature: Pongability

Comment: Great if rinsed in the occasional puddle. “The Feet” have a unique design feature that lets moisture out for cooling and grip but doesn't let moisture in. Get very smelly if enclosed – avoid this.

Rating: 08/10

Feature: Times through the washing machine

Comment: Oh no,definitely not advised!

Rating: N/A

Feature: Ease of cleaning

Comment: A quick hosing down and occasional pruning is all that they need for a lifetimes service.

Rating: 10/10

Feature: Length of laces

Comment: 'Altogether But' have pulled off another unique one-off. Nothing has to be roped on! Fits securely like a skin. Well done 'Altogether But'!

Rating: 10/10

Feature: Flexibility

Comment: Factory tests show the material of the feet is far superior to the finest rubber. Properly maintained they are guaranteed to bend in all the right places.

Rating: 10/10

Feature: Price

Comment: Free at the point of delivery.

Rating: Don't come cheaper. 10/10

Feature: Packaging

Comment: The placental packaging is awfully messy. After the colour the packaging is far and away “The Feet's” worst feature. If only they didn't send them Flat-packed! It takes yonks before “The Feet's” clever and ingenious arch-suspension systems kick-in. Well worth the wait 'though.

Rating: 02/10

Feature: Performance

Comment: 'Altogether But' have packed more design features into “The Feet” than you could shake a stick at. The unique no nonsense moisture-out, no- moisture-in, fast wicking feature has already been mentioned. There is also:

• a unique self-hardening sole which retains its elasticity while the sole-surface develops a thick penetration resistant 'crust',

• special gel-packs are provided from 'Adiposity' which help, in conjunction with the tough but elastic sole to help to reduce penetration rips as well as acting as heat insulation they also help to cushion the bracing struts of “The Feet”,

• the most stunning feature from 'Altogether But' is the unique load bearing, weight spreading, sprung arch suspension system. It only loads on demand which is an ingenious energy saving device that is also – amazingly self repairing and so requires the minimum maintenance. Be very wary of other brands and take no heed of their advertising claims. Recent factory tests show despite 'fancy' claims other brands make, they may not be all they purport to be.

• Another stunning feature is the ingenious triple arch system designed by Arch Architect from 'Altogether But' involves a 3 arch system which is remotely sprung through an ingenious double spiral winding. It gives fantastic spring recoil return. Once you really experience this system giving a lilt and spring to your step your loyalty to this brand will be secure. It's the nearest thing to perpetual motion!

• More amazing features, besides the on-board 'Plantarplexus' computer for ground sensing there is a link-up to two even more powerful computers operating remotely in the length of the back and in the top of the head. Just switch it on – forget that MP3 player – listen into “The Feet's” frequency. What a wow factor!

• We haven't even mentioned that the feet come with a design feature that rarely sees the light of day. It's called 'The Toes': How they really work is a closely guarded company secret locked away in the vaults of 'Altogether But'. (Even company H.Q.'s location is a secret. Whisper is it might be near New Haven? Who knows. God knows!)

'Altogether But' is a well chosen name for the company that bring you “The Feet”. Send £250.00 right away. You'll be amazed they are so light you'll feel you've nothing on . To all intents they're so invisible that as a special promotional offer we'll send you completely free of charge a certificated license so you can show your friends who probably won't notice that you've even got them on.

HURRY WHILE STOCKS LAST!

Rating: 10/10

Feature: If left on a park bench would someone pinch them

Comment: This is highly unlikely. In all but the hands of a very highly skilled individual a second-hand, used pair of 'The Feet are pretty nigh worthless except for factory testing procedures. If you do find a pair on the park bench send them to 'Altogether But' to recycle 'em.

Rating: 09/10

Feature: Likeability and loyalty score

Comment: For a very long time “The Feet” had a loyal following which went out of fashion. Hopefully this has recently changed. Those who have tried “The Feet” swear by them.

Rating: 9/10 and beyond

Feature: Durability

Comment: With minimum care and maintenance they will simply last a lifetime.

I have in my hand a Nike-Air shoe for a 3 year old - quite an expensive item I would guess. Someone on a Course picked it up on the tide-line and thought it might be of interest and they were right! From the heel to the toe there is no bend or give in the sole of this shoe. Completely rigid, this shoe will restrict movement of the forefoot to zero. Compare this kiddies' shoe with the latest in Nikes 'Run Barefoot' range of adult running shoe: The Nike Free. The design uses every technological clever device to ensure that the shoe bends at the front of the shoe. A child's foot is flexible while the average adult foot is rigid and inflexible. How did it come to be so dysfunctional? Could it be because tiny flexible children's feet have been conditioned to walk in such restrictive footwear as this tiny shoe?

The striking difference between these two pairs of shoes - the child's and the adult's has been demand led. Shoe manufacturers have altered their designs because people have started to question some core assumptions, changing what they are prepared to pay for. As the results of this percolate through, parents are increasingly beginning to question some core ideas about their kid's shoes.

But how interested are we really? It's been calculated that 90% of the reasons that we buy shoes concern fashion, status and sexual attraction. There is a tiny 10% window through which we become interested in good foot and body use. We do literally vote with our feet on this one: So long as the shoe looks great, we couldn't care less for the effect it might have on our posture and well-being. You've only got to look, for example, at the effect on the lower back of adding one inch to heel height to a shoe. The consequences are dire, but then so too are the effects of restricting key joints in the kiddie's shoe that I have in my hand.

One reason why we will look through the 10% window is to get an edge in our chosen sport activity. And this is how a major sea-change has come about in the running shoe market. Only a few years ago individuals started to have a long hard look at the notion that expensive cushioned running shoes give you that extra edge. The evidence that is in from these researchers seems to show that far from preventing injury these shoes may well be causing them. Is it possible something similar could be happening with kid's shoes? Up until recently we took it as read that our running shoes needed to cushion and support our vulnerable feet. We thought we were doing the very best for our feet by buying top end high tech trainers. Could it be that in even though we are similarly well-intentioned we might be even more radically damaging our children's feet?

We face a fundamental difficulty if we look into this and it is one that I've been addressing for over 25 years. The problem is this: We don't know what a natural stride is. Everything we look at, all our basic assumptions, our frameworks of understanding are taken from feet that have been conditioned to walk in shoes like the one in my hand. There seems to be an inkling - a dim sense that something is amiss with what we do to our children's feet but we have no solid reliable baseline to say this is what happens to the natural foot when it has to adapt to walking in restrictive footwear. Soon, in a couple of generations there will be no examples on earth of feet that have NEVER been in shoes so we will lose any possibility of making important comparisons. We need to thing out of the box (or shoe) here.

If there was a magic wand - you wave it and then experience for yourself a completely natural stride. Wow, it would be such a revealing and deeply shocking thing. We'd be struck by the way a fully functional foot often does the complete opposite to what a shoe-conditioned foot does. But most striking of all would be the feeling of joy and ease that makes the simple act of walking such a delight. We give up far more than we realise. There are, of course, no magic wands, but the work of the natural running courses attempts to re-acquaint runners with the physicality and fun that comes so naturally to the playful child whose movements becomes so restricted in this shoe in my hand.

Among our other concerns for our current generation is the dangerously low level of activity. For the bulk of our history we have been hunter-gatherers designed for high levels of physical activity far in excess of modern lifestyles. Our culture, education, training, increasingly shoves us more and more into our heads and out of our bodies. So many modern maladies find their roots in our ever more inactive lifestyles. Increasingly we see anxious and worried 5 year olds concerned about SAT scores. These are kids who should be tumbling cartwheels, skipping, climbing trees, running around. The kid's shoe in my hand would seriously restrict such playful physicality - make it less fun, less enjoyable. I'm not prepared to do this experiment but I'm sure in my own mind that if I forced my foot into an adult equivalent of this kiddies shoe, then my desire and motivation to be out there running and moving would be seriously diminished. Could the kids shoe issue be part of a much bigger picture? Should we be more concerned about this than we currently are?

Basically we urgently need a baseline, a benchmark to show us just exactly what are the gains and losses of modern protective footwear. True, we are no longer hunter-gatherers. True, our urban environments are full of 'unnatural' dangers. But we might still learn from our origins as well as benefit from our clever technology. One simple thing we might learn from our natural living ancestors: Make footwear temporary. We've come to regard the way we live permanently in our shoe-dwelling as normal and natural. It would be so easy to design shoes that are easily put on and quickly taken off much as we do with gloves. Shoes that give necessary protection without restriction are feasible. If the fascinating sea-change that has happened recently with adult running shoes has anything valuable to guide us through the kid's shoe issue, then key changes will probably be demand-led. Kids shoes will only change when our buying habits do.

For more comment and information see The Guardian article below:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/09/barefoot-best-for-children

I'm at St Mary's Hospice, Ulverston.  From Ulverston you can see Morecambe Bay,  a wilderness where sea-scape, skyscape and landscape sweep together in swathes of openness.  It's a dangerous place, a place of fast moving currents and sinking sands.  My plan is to run the 24 miles or so across to St John's Hospice, Lancaster, taking in the Cross-the-Bay half marathon organised by CancerCare, somewhere in the middle of my run.  My aim is a simple one, based on 25 years of exploring barefoot running.  It is to Go Well.  Runners universally want to go faster, further and better (less injuries).  Running barefoot puts an interesting context to this and some different challenges.  To achieve what I want to achieve, I'm going to have to be more continuously careful than a shod runner – a bit more thoughtful how the foot does down and picks up.  OK here goes.  The first step of the journey in which every step has to - modulate and respond to the changing underfoot terrain. After only four mindful step a car pulls out mindlessly.  I have to nimbly leap out of the way to avoid a quick end to the trip.

'Going well' means linking all the senses together, feeling how head and body synchronise into a smooth flowing action.  Through the town – aware of the usual urban hazards, dodging the dog shit and broken glass.  It's a kind of dance. There's a mile long canal before I reach Canal Foot and along the way I pick up some of the usual comment barefooters get and - great some sponsorship money for CancerCare, who I work for as an Alexander Technique Teacher.  I tell them I'm really only doing it to pay my wages!

From Canal Foot I'm ready to head off into the estuary. I've already been guided through the crossing by Ray Porter, the local guide, as to the best place to cross the day before.  Now I'm heading across the fast flowing currents of the Rivers Crake and Levens.  The sea washed turf on the other side is a barefooter's dream.  The time that I can cross safely and the race start time make it just a little tight, But I'm enjoying getting the timing good so that I don't have to hang around and let muscles go cold before the start of the race. Onto the tarmac lane that leads to Flookburgh – a delightfully smooth surface and perfect running weather conditions.

Yes, the timings work out perfectly.  I arrive 3 minutes before race registration which closes at 1.00pm and now an easy amble to the start line.  I like the contrast between the solitary experience of those first 6/7 miles and now the usual pre-race hub-bub and hype.  I note that I'm really a solitary runner.

Now we're off. The track to the shore is full of sharp stones but mostly I can use the grass fringes and then it's out into the Bay.  I've done this run before.  Its part of the treasure of estuaries – that they change incessantly.  The sand seems more ribbed and harder than last time.  Strangely this is quite a barefoot challenge and not as innocuous as it looks.  The waviness is very unpredictable, the eyes can't compute the corrugations that well.  It stretches the plantar fascia in the sole of my foot this way and that.  Even so I'm putting in comfortable 8 minute miles and finding a really flowing stride. Enjoying the wilderness.

I like to listen to my feet.  It helps to connect head and feet together.  I'm trying to hold a reserve in the tank for the 4 or 5 miles at the other end – keep attending to my running form.

Over the Rivers Keer and Kent and then the course zig-zags around to make up the half-marathon distance, so near yet so far.  I resist a temptation to go with the other runners around me who are experiencing that surge you get as you start to see the finish line.  The talk around me is of the usual finishing line fantasies – the hot shower, the golden hour of feeding your face with steak or whatever.  Partly because my bare feet become obviously more vulnerable as my body fatigues it now requires a special and focussed effort to attend to my running form – to keep going well.  Barefoot/natural strides are naturally shorter lighter and the cadence is quicker.  The last infuriating zig-zag is over – perhaps more frustrating to me because I'm really in a different event.

Crossing the finishing line in about 1 hour 50 minutes but hey - it is still not the end for me, but I'm definitely on the Lancaster end now with 4 miles of canal towpath or pavement running to reach my goal. I wanted to arrive before 4.00pm and I did with 10 minutes to spare making a total journey time of 4 hours and 35 minutes.

I enjoyed every step – except for one dark moment when the tiny sharp gritty stones of the canal towpath caused a momentary wish for some shoes.  A guy cycling home from the race stopped.  He gave me some water and said how much he admired my effort.  As a barefoot runner of 25 years I tend to run to the beat of my own drum and I love to let the changing underfoot terrain direct my pace but this last lift from a fellow runner made the world of difference to me.  I found my light responsive stride again– the sharp tiny stones became nothing more than a foot massage.  I finished without any aches and pains.  As I write (the day after) I have a little stiffness as I get going but no joint pain so I reckon I've stayed flexibly to my plan and Gone Well.