Jessi Stensland keeps a list of words she has banned from her own speech. Some of it is what you would expect, the filler that gets in the way of a more useful vocabulary. One entry is not. “Barefoot” is on the list.

Her background is in sport and in human performance. She was a college swimmer, a professional triathlete and a mountain sport athlete before she began exploring parkour and dance. “I didn’t know my body until later when I was broken,” she says of her time in triathlon. The search for why led her to her feet, and in the end to an objection to the word other people used for them.

“We have these words to describe something from the point of view of consumer items. […] Otherwise I’m just Jessi, I’m just running. I’m using my feet.”

“Barefoot” names a foot by what it lacks, and what it lacks is a product. The word only needs to exist once the shoe has become the reference, the ordinary case against which a foot without one has to be marked. So the body gets described as the exception to its own equipment. A foot doing what feet do is, in the language, a foot missing something.

If someone stops her on a trail to ask whether she runs barefoot, she hands the qualifier back. “I don’t run barefoot, I run. You run in shoes.” Nothing about the run changes. What changes is which of the two needs an adjective.

She makes the comparison herself with gloves. She goes out without them unless she has, in her words, “a reason to put gloves on,” and with shoes “it’s the same way.” Hands have kept their default. Nobody stepping out on a mild morning says they went out bare-handed; the word exists, but it is saved for the unusual case, which is how you can tell where the default still points. For feet it points the other way, and “barefoot” is the record of which object won.

Her remedy is not an argument. It is a habit of speech and attention: “I put feet at the center. I default to feet.” It is not a refusal of shoes either. On a trail she carries a pair and puts them on when she wants to move faster than she would without them. The shoes stay in her life. What has moved is which one is the starting point and which one needs a reason.

While she was trying to work out why her body had broken down, the human performance specialists she trained with told her to engage her big toe, because her leg was unstable and she could not stand on one leg. They had the right idea. “They might’ve said engage your big toe, but they couldn’t see it. And I wasn’t doing it.” The foot they were coaching was inside a shoe, and nobody was taking it off to watch. The object that set the default was also covering the very thing the default is defined against. She eventually saw the problem for herself, looking down at her own feet after a swim and noticing that the two were not alike.

Some of the words you use to describe how you move were coined from somebody else’s point of view. “Bodyweight training” names moving your own body as the category that lacks equipment; a push-up only needs that label because the barbell became the reference. “Rest day” names a day from the program’s side, as the day the program is absent. None of these words is wrong, and most of them are useful. Each one quietly settles what counts as the ordinary case, though, and the ordinary case is rarely you.

Stensland’s practice is to rebuild the question before answering it. Asked how she got into running barefoot, she would reframe it, she says, to something like: “How did you get into feet?”

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “Jessi Stensland: Feet, reflection, and nature,” published December 2, 2020.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.