Ep. 793: Thru-Hiking the Appalachian Trail & Walking Across America…Barefoot - Ron Zaleski
Adventure Sports Podcast
Curt Linville
4.6 • 579 Ratings
🗓️ 27 December 2021
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Barefoot walking: Marine veteran Ron Zaleski's lifelong commitment to going shoeless since 1972 in honor of his fallen Vietnam squadron members, transforming grief into purpose after a child's question, then thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail and walking coast-to-coast barefoot to raise awareness for veterans' challenges.
Back in 1972, Marine veteran Ron Zaleski decided to take off his shoes in honor of the fallen members of his squadron from the Vietnam war. He doesn’t know exactly why not wearing shoes was his answer of how to deal with the grief and guilt but the fact remained that he never put them back on and he had never told anyone why he went barefoot. That is until one day a little boy asked him why he wasn’t wearing shoes…
That boy was the first person Ron had told about why he was living barefoot in over 30 years. Ron immediately saw his dedication to ‘barfootness’ as a way to raise awareness and honor his fallen friends in a much more impactful way. Not long after, Ron set out on a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail and a coast-to-coast walk across the US with no shoes at all to honor and raise awareness for the many challenges veterans face when returning home.
His stories are endless, captivating, and amazingly told.
To learn more about Ron’s story and to buy his book, The Long Walk Home, visit his website, TheLongWalkHome.org, or buy it on Amazon here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | He carried that guilt with him for 60 years. |
| 0:04.9 | So, you know, so he said to me, I will do anything I can to help you. |
| 0:10.5 | And he hugged me like I was the son he had before I went welcome to the adventure sports podcast. I'm your host, Mason. |
| 0:34.6 | Hope you had a good Christmas. If you celebrate Christmas, if you don't, I hope you had a great weekend. |
| 0:39.1 | It was an awesome weekend for us. |
| 0:40.7 | We had such a great time with family. |
| 0:42.7 | And I am actually so excited about today's episode too, because it's been a long time coming. |
| 0:48.0 | I met Ron over a year ago at a Veterans Day bike ride from an adventure. So I was out on a bike packing |
| 0:56.7 | adventure a few weekends before the Veterans Day ride. Met this guy who was so interested in. He and I |
| 1:02.8 | got a talking. Shout out Dwayne if you're listening. And he was like, hey man, we're going to be |
| 1:07.6 | doing this bike ride for Veterans Day in a couple weekends. You should come out and bring athletic brewing, the non-alcoholic beer you work for. It'd be a huge hit at this veterans ride. And I said, oh, that'd be fantastic. It's at this beautiful beach near our home. I'd love to go. So I brought all the beer I had. And it was, it's a supportive veterans, like I said, |
| 1:30.0 | and they had a big steak dinner. The beer goes so great with that. Then everybody can drive home |
| 1:34.0 | safe because it's non-alcoholic beer. And the guy putting on the event, the guy who was kind of, |
| 1:40.3 | who started the whole organization the ride was for was there, Ron, who were talking to today, |
| 1:47.1 | and he had no shoes on his feet. And I thought, and it was raining, you know, there was stuff |
| 1:51.4 | going on. He's carrying stuff. And I was like, hey, man, why aren't you wearing shoes? And he looks |
| 1:55.5 | right at me and says, because I don't want to. You got a problem with that? |
| 2:01.5 | I was like, dang. |
| 2:03.7 | No, I'm good. |
| 2:04.7 | I just was curious. |
| 2:06.2 | And we got to talking. |
| 2:07.5 | And I asked him, well, why aren't you wearing shoes? |
... |
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