Bryan MacDonald was on his way out the door one day when he decided he wasn't in the mood for shoes.
Fifteen years later, the mood still eludes him, and the 64-year-old resident of Windsor, Ont., spends 99 per cent of his walking life shoeless.
“I go everywhere barefoot, even church,” Mr. MacDonald says matter-of-factly. “Once I started doing it, I realized I've hated shoes all my life.”
He even pads around barefoot during the winter, though he draws the line at temperatures below minus 18 (at that point he reluctantly slips on flip flops). The retired auto worker chuckles that his children “think dad's a little crazy” but says a shoeless existence simply feels more natural – and healthier – to him.
Mr. MacDonald is not alone in his quest for foot freedom. The Facebook fan page “Being Barefoot” boasts more than two million fans, and in late June it was one of the fastest-growing pages on the social networking site, according to a trend-tracking website, Inside Facebook. Across the Internet the “barefoot lifestyle” is booming, with adherents turning to websites such as the Society for Barefoot Living (www.barefooters.org), which has more than 1,200 members.
Moe Morales, right, who prefers to go barefoot, walks along Yonge Street with his friend Gary Gagnon in Toronto.
There is also the Living Barefoot (www.livingbarefoot.info) site which launched in January and hosts The Barefoot Living Show podcast, launched yesterday. Founder and Vancouver barefooter Al Gauthier says membership has grown to about 140 people, with traffic reaching 4,000 hits a month.
But despite the growing ranks of this barefoot army, a naked foot still sticks out like a sore toe. Most people associate bare feet with poor hygiene and trashy behaviour – just think of the collective “ewww” a 2004 photo of Britney Spears's barefoot jaunt into a gas station bathroom spawned across the world.
These are exactly the kinds of negative reactions and attitudes that everyday barefooters hope to combat.
“We're there to put out the word but we're also there to connect people to the community,” Mr. Gauthier says. “Hopefully in the future, I'd like the group of us to affect some change.”
Mr. Gauthier says more people are questioning the benefits of traditional footwear thanks in part to products such as Vibram FiveFingers, deemed one of the best inventions of 2007 by Time Magazine. The form-hugging shoe sports individual toes and is made from a thin, stretchy fabric, allowing wearers to feel the ground beneath their feet (it looks like a winter glove for the foot). Since debuting in Canada in 2006, sales have tripled every year, according to Vibram's publicist Anne Tommasi.
For 32-year-old Tina Dubois, buying a pair of FiveFingers was her first step into barefoot territory. An avid runner, Ms. Dubois suffers from various sports-related injuries, including a bad back and plantar fasciitis, a painful inflammatory condition often caused by walking or jogging on hard surfaces. Since banning regular shoes from her wardrobe, she says her chronic pain has all but vanished.
Ms. Dubois recently took the plunge into total foot nudity and has gone on barefoot walks around her Cochrane, Alta., neighbourhood. She also recently did some shoeless shopping for the first time, finding the experience surprisingly pleasant.
“I kind of wanted to see what walking is like the way we were evolved to walk,” she explains. “When you walk completely barefoot, it's a much gentler way to step.”
Toronto's Mauricio Morales, aka “Barefoot Moe,” agrees that walking sans shoes feels more natural, and says his gait has improved since he first ditched footwear in 1993. His shoeless wanderings know few bounds and his soles have come into contact with every surface imaginable, from nightclub dance floors to Chinatown sidewalks. The freelance graphic designer has even showed up shoeless for job interviews in the past.
