Midlife crisis?

A running colleague of mine triggered an interesting reflection. I was asked if all this, the barefoot switch, the blog, was the result of midlife crisis. May be I was going through a midlife crisis, reaching 40, and may be that was the reason why I wanted to switch to barefoot. I actually never though of it like that. After thinking about it for a while, including while running, I can safely say that the answer is 'NO!'. I am pretty happy with my situation, my family, my sport. I am not going through a midlife crisis. Or at least, not that I know of. After all, what is midlife crisis? I don't know. May be I'll look back in some years and actually realize that I was going through it. At least, if that is what I am going through, it is pretty nice, painless. So far.

No, I think this is more due to the fact that with age, you pay more attention to your body, you listen more to it. You also want to try new things, want to improve the way you are doing what you are doing. By example, a couple of years ago, I bought a book about how to improve your swimming. Despite the fact that I was swimming for more than 10 years, I did learn something, there was still interesting tips and I am still trying new tricks while swimming. I could have started a blog about 'How I improved my swimming'. What about that? No midllife crisis, in fact, the inputs were varied. I started to hear about barefoot running, started to read about it, was prompted by friends, colleagues. It is a long time since I was tempted by a safer way of running. Like a lot of people, I was just not convinced by the whole barefoot propaganda. Now, I am at least convinced enough to be willing to give it a try. And I have to say that so far, it has been very positive, in many aspects. I haven't run for very long yet, but I can already feel interesting changes in my body, the feet, the posture, ... . So far, so good. But no midlife crisis, no.

Another barefoot attempt tomorrow. Cheers