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Things Your Training Partner Won’t Tell You

Love it.  Tee, let me know when you want to get off that trainer and go for a real run :)

What Your Training Partner Won’t Tell You, via No Meat Athlete:

1. You will not lose momentum if you stop moving during a run. So quit jogging in place at the stoplight. You look like an idiot.

2. There are at least two embarrassing songs on everyone’s iPod playlist. There is no need to pretend you don’t know how they got there. Just own up to your love for N’Sync.

3. Everyone pees in the pool at some point. Everyone. Anyone who says they haven’t is lying. The same goes for the mass start of an open-water swim. There’s a reason that water feels so warm.

4. Please limit yourself to no more than two electronic devices when we work out together. Anything more and you have more wires coming out of you than an ICU patient.

5. Newton shoes are the Ed Hardy shirt of running.

6. Outside of your running group, no one really cares if you did a brutal 12-miler this morning. No need to try to work it into every conversation you have at work, at school, while shopping, at the bank…

7. It’s kind of annoying when you stretch in inappropriate places, like at the checkout aisle of the grocery store.

8. The first open-water swim any swimmer or triathlete does is scary. Almost everyone panics during their first. It’s normal. The real champs are the ones who face it and get back in there for a second.

9. If you’re on a Century ride and take a break: Eat first. Reapply chamois cream second. Never, ever,ever the other way around.

10. It’s not bragging if you can do it. But until you’ve done it — zip it.

..rest of the list here.

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Thoughts on Barefoot Running

After several bike/run bricks, I was looking forward to getting in a nice long tempo run through DC.  At a little under 9 miles, not only was this my longest run of the year, it was also my longest ever barefoot run.

Generally when people find out that I like to run without shoes, they first ask whether I’ve suffered some sort of brain trauma.  Other comments likely include:

•  Doesn’t it hurt??
•  Aren’t you worried about stepping on glass/needles/poop?
•  Running in grass is ok, but the road/sidewalk is too hard!
•  Your feet and ankles need support, that’s why they make motion-controlled shoes.

To be honest, while I was still running shod, I would’ve had the same reactions. The turning point for me was reading the book, “Born to Run,” about an elite tribe of distance athletes in Mexico called the Tarahumara, arguably the greatest runners in the world.  Even at an early age, running is ingrained in Terahumara culture; their children watch with admiration as the adults, many barefoot, engage in a form of soccer that would often take them 40 or more miles from home.  To them, sheer joy and a sense of community was the essence of running.  In America, however, running has little to do with passion; it’s become a mundane chore: something we have to do, not that we want to do.  

We strap on our bulky, pronation-controlled shoes, shove ear buds into our ears, and set off, pounding our heels mercilessly into the ground with each step. Transitioning to barefoot has taught me a lot about proper mechanics, but more than anything, it’s simply brought back the fun of running for me.  Watch any child running without shoes through a park and you know they have the right idea.  It’s only when we’re older that we’re told we have to protect our feet at all costs, putting them in these artificial casts with so much padding that we nearly forget what it’s like to connect with the earth in the same way our ancestors did.

To briefly address the concerns above: I’m not a masochist, so no, I wouldn’t continue doing something that really hurts me.  It’s usually just like a good foot massage, with a natural pumice stone.  Next, you’d be surprised how much easier it is to avoid objects on your path when you’re not wearing shoes.  I’ve become a much more observant runner than I was in the past, so this really hasn’t been an issue for me.  While hard, running on smooth sidewalks is like butter for me.  Our bodies automatically adjust to changes in terrain density and our Achilles tendons and calves work far better at shock absorption than any air-injected heel on a shoe. Finally, our feet and ankles are weak because we make them weak.  If you’ve worn a cast, picture how your arm looked when it was removed.  Muscles deteriorate when we don’t use them; as long as you don’t increase mileage too quickly, your feet and ankles will become stronger.  Mine certainly have.

For those curious to what feet look like after 9 miles through the streets of DC..  I did probably make Mistake #3 from the previous post, but fuck it; I was having a blast :)

 

Final thought: 

Humans have engaged in endurance running for millions of years, but the modern running shoe was not invented until the 1970s. For most of human evolutionary history, runners were either barefoot or wore minimal footwear such as sandals or moccasins with smaller heels and little cushioning relative to modern running shoes.

Read more here: 
http://www.barefootrunning.fas.harvard.edu/

All for now-

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