One Rainy Wish

Ok – back on track with the 50 schedule I had. I think if I pace myself properly I can get up to 18 this weekend (mid 40’s for the week), as the schedule calls for. Decided to go to Heritage Park for today’s 6.5 miler since 1) I didn’t want to run on the street in the pouring rain, running under trees would be safer with storm clouds overhead and 2) who can pass up a muddy trail in a downpour?

Loved every second of it. Wore the NorthFace (semi-waterproof) but probably didn’t need it. Got too hot – more sweat coming out than there was rain moisture getting in. Oh well, will know better next time.

FiveFingers are perfect in the rain. Like wearing aqua sox, you can charge through deep puddles and it’s not like running with wet towels wrapped around your feet. Only downside is they have no traction, and thus get really slippery on muddy inclines. Learned to take these slow, though, and it was fine. I needed to, anyways, since I wanted to avoid hip soreness.

Clocked low 7’s pace for the last mile home. Didn’t take anything to drink or eat – hoping to burn fat and train my body not to depend on those things. Worked out well – a little hunger at beginning and end, but running fresh throughout. No walking breaks, except for aforementioned hills. Less than 5 minutes of walking total.

Runs keep getting better, but a touch of hip pain in the other leg now. Going to swim tomorrow night and take a day off my feet. Only 3 miles of speedwork are scheduled for Wed, so I don’t think I’m missing out any significant distance.

Can’t wait until my joint health catches up to my ambitions.

Love Hurts

Finally getting back on track. A handful of 10+ milers last week and some fairly strong shorter runs and I’m feeling pretty alright, bruises aside.

The image to the right is the result of a completely barefoot (sans FFs, even) 4 mile trail run and apparently invisible jagged rocks. I’m all into purity and all, but that might be enough to keep me away from that notion for the foreseeable future.

Not much happened over the last few days on account of insane sleeping schedules and working on new magazine templates (I was working until 8am, Saturday night to Sunday morning), but I got my payback today in the form of the best 10 miles I’ve run to-date. My first double-digits run in the FiveFingers and honest to God the most enjoyable miles I’ve ever run. It didn’t hurt that Lakeshore Park is hands down the most curvaceous trail I’ve seen, and the terrain is technical-ish without being too steep. Basically 10 miles of gorgeous single track, surprisingly located just down the street from Twelve Oaks. On account of the thick tree cover, you can faintly hear traffic, and only here-and-there. The only other noises are the wildlife and every now and then the gear-changing of passing bikers.



The completely lightweight FiveFingers kept me reasonably fresh well into the final mile, which I churned out at an 8 minute pace. There are still some coping issues in the form of toe-stubbing and blisters on the ball of my foot, but my joints and muscles feel amazing. I could have easily thrown on a few more miles – will bump it up to 15 next week and see if I feel as good. Hoping to be back up into the 20’s by the end of June – and feeling as great.

I’m really digging the FiveFingers and it’s getting harder for me to imagine wearing regular shoes again – at least on trails. The extra padding of conventional shoes helps a lot on pavement, even when I’m running with (what I believe to be) good form. We’ll see. Ongoing process, but as an update these things continue to amaze me.

TenFingers

Attempting my first 10 miler (or more) in the FiveFingers in about 1/2 an hour. Great timing that I happened upon this article just now. Excerpt below.

“Everyone who wears shoes walks wrong,” he says, echoing the headline of his recent article, “You Walk Wrong.”

Sternbergh calls the ubiquity of footwear a “conspiracy of idiocy.” He points out the probability that at no point did any shoemaker say, “Let’s design something that works with your foot.” In the Middle Ages, for example, people began wearing shoes with higher heels to avoid stepping in other people’s excrement. Today, high heels are considered sexy. Whatever their reasons for wearing the shoes they wear, people don’t usually consider whether a shoe actually works with their foot, he says.

The human foot works pretty well on its own, Sternbergh says, and it doesn’t need a lifetime of help from shoes. He explains the basic illogic of footwear by comparing the concept to a perpetual cast. “Imagine if someone put a cast on your arm when you were 3 years old and you never took it off,” he says. “Your arm would stop working. That’s kind of what’s happened with our feet.”