My First Obstacle Course Challenge: Barefoot Running in Downtown Belleville

Movies—and seeing my wife do it—inspired me to get into running.

So, I signed up for a learn-to-run program in the fall of 2019.

There were running and stretching techniques and that kind of thing, but the most important part was that for six weeks, I had an appointment every Wednesday evening to go running. Otherwise, I was never actually going to do it.

In my mind, running is a boring but necessary life skill.

If you’re running from a T. rex or running to save your kid’s life, that’s awesome. Even an obstacle course challenge—I love that. Or running trails on a Saturday morning with my wife—that’s great. It’s kind of nice when you can go on a Saturday morning date run together.

Other than that, I don’t want to go for long runs just for the fun of it.

I’m a minimal-effective-dose strength trainer.

A sprinter, if you will.

But give me a camera to photograph a six-hour race, and I’ll be there, right in the heart of the trail system. I’ll go the distance for that.

But do I want to be the one running for six hours? Oh my goodness—no way. Not in a million years.

I needed a twist to make the learn-to-run program fun… for me.

So I decided to run barefoot. I had seen the idea on Shark Tank.

They were selling a product for barefoot runners. A thin piece of fabric you put over the bottom of your foot. You wear it like a flip-flop, but it doesn’t flop around. Try running in flip-flops—I’ve done that too, and it’s less fun than you think.

And so I thought, okay, I’m going to do this barefoot running. And of course, I didn’t have any products for my feet. It was literally just my feet hitting the sidewalk. We’re running through town, so sometimes it was pavement, sometimes gravel, sometimes I’m running around broken glass. I mean, this is downtown Belleville.

If you know anything about downtown Belleville, you understand there’s a drug usage problem down there. So sometimes I’m running around puddles of people’s vomit, etcetera… barefoot.

Well, there you go. That was my first obstacle course challenge—barefoot running through the learn-to-run program in downtown Belleville.

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Mat Coker is a barefoot trail running photographer in Ontario, Canada.

He watches Shark Tank because he loves entrepreneurship, creativity, and all that stuff. He learns about other people’s businesses for entertainment, because it’s fun—just like, for some people, running is fun.

Left, barefoot running the North of 7 OCR.