Last night I went on an amazing run

Last night I went on an amazing run. Barefoot of course. Effortlessly along farm tracks, across fields, always a pleasant surface underfoot, with the scarp face of the Blackdown Hills lightly sprinkled with snow ahead of me on the horizon. Culmstock Beacon there somewhere but too far away to resolve. Blue skies and neither too hot nor too cold - it must have been Spring. I realised I had insufficient time to make it all the way to the hills so, at the next opportunity and in a small village, I turned right and followed a winding path down hill that I part recognised: a steep bank on my right coming up to chest height and overlooking a decorative lily pond with only a narrow path at foot level to run along. After various turns, this brought me out to the coast road where I turned right and ran on, under a railway bridge, and then slightly up hill. The sea, I knew, was still a ways away on my left - perhaps half a mile.  I must have left the road because now I was following and plashing through a cold stream that flowed from the hills overlooking the sea. Suddenly I was brought to a standstill at a precipice with the raging sea hundreds of feet below me. Sandy coves swept away to my left but ahead and to my right were sharp cliffs running down to the sea. I started climbing down with several false starts until at last I was at sea level negotiating rocks and inlets but with fair assurance that the going would get better once I had made it around this headland. For hadn't I been along this route before? But then I woke up.

Take care how you walk

A man-taught man would have picked his way with many stumbles through the cheating moonlight, but Mowgli's muscles, trained by years of experience, bore him up as though he were a feather. When a rotten log or a hidden stone turned under his foot he saved himself, never checking his pace, without effort and without thought... 

Here, again, a man-trained man would have sunk overhead in three strides, but Mowgli's feet had eyes in them, and they passed him from tussock to tussock and clump to quaking clump without asking help from the eyes in his head. He ran out to the middle of the swamp, disturbing the duck as he ran, and sat down on a moss-coated tree-trunk lapped in the black water. 

Sadly I'm nowhere near that level but none-the-less I like the way I can pick my way across this sort of ground without looking at my feet - generally my gaze is fixed on the ground somewhere between about one and five metres ahead, depending on my speed and the severity of the terrain, and somehow my feet land in the right place - usually. It is of course in my body's interest - the penalty for getting it wrong is a bloody toe that will take a week or so to heal. I can assure any would-be barefoot runners that, as one's feet harden, stubbed toes, cracks and splinters become less and less common. But they don't go away!