After years of planning to trek the route of the UTMB foot race, we hiked the Tour of Mont Blanc July 11-22!

I created a reasonably detailed 18 minute video about the journey, focused on the unusual idea of hiking it in minimalist sandals. See below. As usual, I realized there many things I forgot to mention, such as how every day, we marveled at the idea that the fastest ultra runners covered the whole thing in less than 20 hours! With seven of us in our group for a self-organized adventure overseas, there were so many moving parts, that needed to flow. Fortunately we got good flow, and I’m gratefully able to look back on this experience with reverence. In part for all of the positive benefits of my “experiments in truth” that were very much inspired by Christopher McDougal’s stories in “Born To Run”, which I first read in 2010. In December of 2010, about six years after my cancer diagnosis, I adopted the best ideas and stuck with them.

Running barefoot, running minimalist, running extra long distances, fueling on plant based foods and, striving to live much more cooperatively vs competitively was and remains a focus as an Ohio suburban dad striving to live more like the Raramuri! Initially, the primary goal of going all plant based nutritionally, along with other key changes, was to finally shed the statins and minimize risk of a future cancer diagnosis. So far, so good as I’m at 20 years from the big C diagnosis.

Everyone in our group was key to making the adventure a success from planning to executing and getting home safely.

Gandhi’s autobiography was titled, “My Experiments in Truth”. His book was a slow read for me, but since then, I think of my healing and growing processes as experiments. The unintended positive consequences of this experimentation keep surprising me. Experiments, chosen carefully, are based on science and ideas from some of the greatest human minds.

The video gets into some details of how the hike was structured. I tried to mostly go slow and really soak it in, breathing deep, searching the landscape near and far to find an ideal photo angle, touching the moss, ground, foliage, rocks, and rails with hands and feet. I put bare feet or sandal clad feet in the streams, swam in Champex-Lac, got kissed my a cow, let the dirt soak into the soles of my feet. I hiked barefoot a couple times, ran with a fast-pack a few times to loosen up the legs and feel the place in a different way. I foraged for berries, seeking to let the trail be part of me.

We are nature, so becoming the trail to the extent possible, felt so good.

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