Ouch!

My ancles hurt. Like hell. Apparently barefoot running puts lot of strain on the ancle muscles, especially when running on asfalt. That's a common rookie mistake, I'm now reading all over the place, to start out with too long distances. I think i did 2 km in my home brewed Huaraches (the flip-flops I butchered and put together again. I call them Frankenstein's Fliparaches) and 2 km barefoot. Obviuosly a bit too long to start with.

I've been reading some really fun stuff about the whole barefoot /minimalistic running thing, I mean, it's not an alltogether balanced debate. I guess that's what makes it so fun! It's really polarized and sometimes rightout abusive, but most of the time just fun. Hear this, for example, doesn't it give your cheeks a kind of blush of embarrassed recognition?

"Recently my hipster friends started running. Inspired by Born to Run, however, they spend more time quoting Barefoot Ted and explaining how shoe companies conspire against me, than actually running. They take every opportunity to bash shod runners for not seeing the One Truth - that barefoot running is a sacred ritual, and everything else is unnatural and wrong. Every now and again, they take their Garmin watch, their iPod, and put on their $150 Vibrams to waddle a mile or two. Before heading out the door, they are happy to remind me: “Henrik, you really should go natural”."

Read the whole post here:

http://halhen.tumblr.com/post/971212244/barefoot-vs-shoes-my-bias

Tomorrow I'm getting out again, to waddle a mile or two in my Fliparaches. See ya!

//J

I went running wearing my brand new, home made Huaraches today. First it felt really wierd. I could actually feel that my feet and legs, especially the right one, where crocked. My right knee was sort of bent inwards and the foot twisted clockwise, making it really hard to run and look remotely sane at the sam time. What was going on!? After a short while the feet and legs sorted them self out and started behaving normally again.

Or did they? Or is it, or was, up til right now, a normal condition for my feet to be "supported" by custom moulded, arch supporting, pronation compensating high-tech sneakers, so "supported" they actually had been disconnected from the job they where supposed to do: Feel the ground and give me feedback on what's down there. For the first time in a very long time my feet where actually feeding me information! And the information was being used by my brain to calibrate what the feet where up to. All of a sudden, the positions they had getting used to assume when running was plainly wrong.

After a couple of km, I concluded that, allthough better than wearing shoes, the Huaraches I'd made wasn't giving the effect I hoped fore. They where simply too thick to let me feel the ground properly. I stuck the sandals in my hand and run barefoot all the way home. It fealt great!

The lessons learned from todays run are:

- Use thin sandals. Im going to peel off three out of four layers from my former flip-flops, hope it'll give the effect I want.

- I think, and will of course try the theory, that a piece of leather would be optimal for feet coverage. The leather is thin enough to let the foot feel the ground properly, yet sturdy enough to protect your feet from sharp stuff on the ground.

- When running on asfalt without shoes, the ancle muscles work a lot. Ouch, now I can allmost walk again.

Today, the first day efter my first barefoot running experience, I was longing to get out in the trail again. This sounds corny, but it's as if my feet had been re-discovered and now was screaming for some action - They have a job to do, and they want to get to it NOW! No more droning around, half asleep embedded in their half-a-fortune, foam rubber incubators. Just woken from over thirty years of coma, they where just excited to start doing something meaningful for a change.

Since I only have asfalt arround me where I live, I thought I'd best get something to protect the souls of my feet before getting out there. The obvious choice of footwhere seemed to be the Tarahumara style Huaraches, and I found lots of info on the net covering how to order them, ware them and make them. So I decided to make a pair.

After digging arround for sutable material for a while, I found an old pair of flip-flops laying arround. Perfect! Foot-shaped and with holes allready cut out. I cut the old rubber straps off replaceing them with straps made out of an old fleece jacket. Lets giv'em a try!

First run with no shoes

Yesterday I was helping my seven-year-old daughter running an orienteering competition, in the beautiful forrests in Salem south of Stockholm. Half a kilometer in to the race I decided to ditch my sneakers- a brand new pair of 150 EUR Nike Air, and run the rest of the race in only my socks. Why? I'd just started to read "Born to run" by Christopher McDougal about the benefits of barefoot running and was eager to try- Given my three years old knee injury just keep getting worse (despite the fancy trainers and medical training), I hadn't much to loose. Let's face it, I'd trained less and less during the passed year, much because the aching knee just took the joy out of it and I was about to quit running all together.

When reading Born to Run, the pieces sort of came together. Not only had my injury gotten worse from using the advanced trainers I'd bought. The injury itself actually was caused by a pair! But more about that later...

This was a very short orienteering race, only 2 km (remember, it was for eight year-olds...) but we covered different types of terrain, we ran on dirt roads, a boulder field, soft grassy paths, muddy tire-track roads and the rim of farmed fields. The funny thing was that no matter the terrain, my feet seemed to find ways to avoid the sharp rocks and pointy sticks, and the rest of the body emediately adjusted, aiming to give the feet as little impact to the ground as possible. I could feel that my running style pretty much emulated the barefoot running I'd been reading about: Toes pointing down, every step landing on the front part of the foot, upper body in a more up-right position, moving almost nothing vertically.

A streange thing is that during the race and all day following, I actually felt my feet in a way I usually don't. It was like they had been awakened, and had woken on their sunny side too! A vague tickeling sensation in my feet followed me all day, a bit like after you've had a good foot massage! That just cannot be a bad thing.