On the Road Again

Tuesday I left Coaldale around noon. Up the driveway and turned left.
I took my time, walking through the canyon. Took a nap at the Cotopaxi store and dipped my feet in the river just beyond the KOA. I made seventeen miles on the day, by ten oclock, and stopped for the night at a pulloff by the road.
In the morning I woke up sore. Sore, blistered feet and sore shoulders. The first ten miles I stopped six times for short rests, putting my feet in the water whenever I could. The sun fell down into the canyon and cooked the road and the sweat stuck to my shirt.
Beyond Parkdale I started feeling better. Climbing the long hill after crossing the river, clouds blew in and it started raining and I felt refreshed. Made another six miles before pulling over to eat through a box of granola bars. I decided, nearing Canon City, to walk over Skyline Drive. The last time I walked the Drive was in January, at one oclock in the morning, during a blizzard, and it felt cathartic, in a sense, to do it now, on my return.
After climbing up and over the ridge and dropping down into town I made my way to my uncle's house. Crossed the highway and the river and walked through the duck park. Last school year this is where I stayed, for six months. Now my Grandmother has moved in, though just briefly. She's recently sold her house and is waiting for the apartment complex where she's going to be moving to open a spot. It felt odd coming back, after three months away. But it felt good, I guess, too.
The next day my uncle and I walked from his house out through town. He's become a big walker, himself, in the last couple of years and he wanted to see me off. We walked for eleven and a half miles, out to a local hot springs called the Well, where he left his truck.
I stayed the night with Timothy Fleming, at his house in Florence, and planned to leave the next morning, but the weather turned overnight, and we woke up to rainy skies. So I took a needed day off, and spent some extra time with friends. Watched a movie and played Pictionary with EasyCheese.
The next morning was equally gray, and I was still a little sore and still a little unready to leave, so I didn't. Took one last day in town.
Sunday I left Tim's. The rain wasn't gone but I needed to take off. And really, as I walked, the weather proved to be wonderful. Cloudy and cool but only a little bit of moisture. I walked twenty three miles on the day, into Pueblo, and spent the night behind a Walgreen's.

At the beginning of my trip - the first couple of weeks, in Washington - the amount of time I spent barefoot was fairly small. I estimate that I averaged 40 - 50 percent. By the time I got to Oregon I was toughening up, at least in terms of my callouses, and the rate increased. I had worried that the rain would be terrible for my feet, but though it wasn't helpful, it didn't seem to slow me down a whole lot. In the mornings I would wake up with puckered, raw soles, but a large coating of Vaseline and a few miles on the road loosened them back up. Through most of Oregon, and into Idaho, I estimate averaging 60 - 70 percent barefoot.
In central Idaho the weather started warming up. Through Fairfield and Carey and Arko and Blackfoot, and so forth, the average dropped again, on the hot pavement, though that, too, seemed to get better with time. By Utah and Wyoming, and Utah again, I started to get into a rhythm, and figured out how to work with the heat, and brought the average back up.
Around the time I entered Colorado my feet started to really bother me in other ways. For a while I thought that I was getting stone bruised, but later decided that my arches were starting to go downhill. I'm still not positive if that was the case, but regardless, I started putting on my sandals more, sometimes stuffing extra padding underneath the arches to give them more support.
At home, in the three week stretch off the road, all of the aches and pains in my feet seemed to heal. Starting out again, the arches felt as strong as ever. Unfortunately, my callouses seemed to have all but smoothed away. In the first five miles from home I re-received a good helping of blisters, and what tolerance I had to the hot pavement was gone. So now I'm rebuilding my soles, and not averaging more than 30 - 40 percent without my sandals.
When I left home I had no real idea of what to expect from the road. I had trained myself up for several months but really had done little, in terms of how much needed to be done. I hoped that I could walk almost entirely barefoot, but I didn't know. And even with a thousand miles under my belt I still hoped that there would come a point when I could put down the sandals for good. At this point I'm not sure that that's possible. There are a lot of factors that determine how much I do barefoot - the heat, the rain, chipseal, the time of day, the amount of traffic - and there's no way I can work around all of them, all of the time. In a week or two I should be able to pull my average up fairly high, again. But I think, now, that I'm probably not going to be able to make it to a hundred percent, at any point.
I hope that I haven't made it seem that I'm doing more than I have been. I've been doing, simply, as much as I can, and that's what I'll continue to do.