A Dutch man who walked barefoot from Los Angeles to Times Square to raise awareness for men’s mental health and set a Guinness World Record completed his 260-day journey on Saturday.
Anton Nootenboom, an Army veteran, said the first thing he will do after walking 3,100 miles over eight and a half months is put on a pair of shoes and socks.
“They’ll be there, right at the finish line,” Nootenboom, 37, told The Post on Thursday from Staten Island.
“I almost forgot what it feels like.”
In order to set the world record, he was not allowed to have anything on his feet while he walked, not even a Band-Aid.
He could have worn socks and shoes while taking breaks, but decided not to — so the last time he had anything touch his feet besides asphalt and concrete was Feb. 17, the day he embarked on the intrepid trek.
Nootenboom, known as “The Barefoot Dutchman” with 1.3 million people following his journey via his Facebook, Instagram and TikTok pages, said the expedition was hard on his tootsies.
“They’ve been through the desert and snow. There’s definitely been small shards of broken glass. When a car tire blows, there’s metal pins in them, so I had to pull them out of my foot quite a lot,” he said.
“The first month or so was the most interesting because my skin was still pretty soft … and then you have the concrete of the roads, it becomes like sandpaper. And little rocks would just go inside those wounds.”
His girlfriend and dog accompanied him in a camper van.
“Where we sleep every night is a full surprise. We never know where we’re going to end up. In the bigger cities, it’s Walmart parking lots — they got a toilet,” he explained.
“But out West, of course, it’s just mainly desert. So we were just camping in the middle of nowhere, surviving on canned food. We slept in a lot of national forests.”
Occasionally, they stayed in hotels overnight to shower — and other guests were taken aback by Nootenboom’s lack of footwear and “look at me like I’m from Mars or something,” he said.
Good Samaritans they met along the way also offered their homes as lodging.
“We would meet them at a dog park or a coffee shop, anywhere. And we would just start chatting about what we were doing and they would just invite us to stay at their house,” he said.
Nootenboom, who served in the Dutch Army for 10 years and did three tours in Afghanistan, timed the end of his voyage to coincide with Movember, the annual fundraising campaign for men’s health, and has raised over $40,000 so far.
When he left the Army, he sold all his possessions and decided to travel, which eventually took a toll on his mental health, and in 2018, he fell into a deep depression.
“It was heartbreak, financial pressure, not being in the right job … I ended up back in a hostel … I was in my bunk bed, in my early 30s, realizing that I fully lost my own identity,” he explained.
“For 10 years, all I had to do was just pretend I was a bush. I had this very goal-driven life in the Army … and now all the sudden I had no direction.”
Nootenboom was living near the beaches of Sydney, Australia when he began walking barefoot, which he said is common there, to keep his mind occupied.
He quickly discovered that walking sans shoes or socks was helping his psyche.
“I always thought it was a bunch of hippie stuff. But then I started to feel that the charge of the earth, it holds a certain energy, and we are supposed to be walking barefoot, so we can get that energy,” he explained. “You start to create the happy chemicals once your bare feet touch the earth.”
His persona “The Barefoot Dutchman” was born in 2019, after he went to the base camp of Mount Everest barefoot, a feat that had never been accomplished prior.
He already set the record for longest barefoot walk in 2021, when he trekked the roughly 1,900 miles from Cairns to Sydney. In January, a Polish man, Pawel Durakiewicz, broke that record, and Nootenboom reached out to him.
“I sent him a message like, ‘I’m so sorry, man, but I’m about to do almost double that,’” he said.
Nootenboom said he plans to complete more world records.
“I will never do something as big as this again, let me say that,” he said.
“There are world records you can do in a day or two.”
