A new blog. A new post.

This blog goes along with a journey I've taken over the last year or so when I started to take off my shoes. I was one of those kids who was taken to what my mother called "The Orthopod" at a young age. The doctor always looked alarmed before he prescribed some correction - bars for my turned-in legs, big, clunky, protective clown shoes for my very flat, pronated feet. As a result, my legs and feet did not develop correctly. I found some help through ballet and eventually danced professionally, even after arthroscopic surgery on a chronic sprain which probably could have been avoided with better foot and leg development.

When I went back to school and stopped dancing constantly I had foot pain again. I visited Dr. Valmassy, a podiatrist at St. Francis Sportsmedicine. His response was to laugh at my feet and exclaim,

"You're a dancer?"

He made what he called my "skis," which cost about $300, then clapped my feet into supportive, cushioned sneakers that cost about $100. As a result, my feet hurt even worse whenever I'd take my shoes off.

I developed a long term back injury that lasted about a decade, which I can now directly trace to a lack of tone and efficiency in my foundation - my feet and lower legs. My knees always felt like they were on the verge of pain because my lower legs would go into spasm.

I became a Pilates instructor in 2003 because it was the only thing that seemed to help my pain. I continued to dance and choreograph.

Pregnancy and motherhood are always big shifts in mindset, I think. In my case I believe that I became a more independent thinker. I've always been a problem-solver, but felt as if I had to keep up with what everyone else was doing around me. In the isolation of early motherhood groupthink became much less important to me. It's never something I've been good at, anyway. So why bother?

Way back in the early years of my back injury, my first Pilates instructor, Elizabeth Larkam, gave me a series of exercises that mobilized my ankle joints. Back then it made no sense to me to connect my core and spinal functionality to how my feet worked, but after watching how my feet loosened and became stable, adaptive platforms during pregnancy, I took another look at those ideas. It was especially interesting to me because all my back pain actually disappeared during those nine months, while the ligaments and muscles release to accommodate the changes that happen during gestation.

Five years later, I've left all my supportive shoes behind and spend a lot of time toning and releasing my feet, ankles and lower legs. After years of hearing doctors say that my flatfootedness and pronation were irreversible, I now have strong, flexible arches on feet that stand securely in neutral.

I am creating a movement practice that connects the feet and how they interact with gravity and the ground to the core and the rest of the body. I recently completed a mentorship with Elizabeth which explored training people out of their shoes, and into a healthier gait. Workshops and writings to come...here's where I intend to think out loud and perhaps to hear what other people are thinking about. It's an odd feeling to go off on my own and to find out that plenty of other people are now on that same path.

I'm also a barefoot/minimal shoe runner, which is another amazing topic for another time.

So, welcome.

If there is anyone out there interested in this same topic, who manages to find this quiet place in the din of the blogosphere, please feel free to share your own experiences here.