Bare feet

Today I didn't feel like I had much time to spare—I have a lot to get done—so I decided to take a short barefoot hill run rather than skipping the run altogether. Adding 1.3 miles to the log isn't much, but zero would have brought the average down much more.

Seriously, that's exactly what today's short run was: a test. I wanted to know if I feel good enough to run a race tomorrow. Until yesterday I'd been planning on representing my neighborhood at the DSE Potrero Hill 4 Miler, a really fun course around my neighborhood and up San Francisco's real twistiest (or at least most sinuous) street, Vermont Street. It's a course that gets run only once a year and I've been looking forward to running it this year.

Long, slow distance, that is. It means exactly what it says—running for distance rather than speed. It's what I've been doing since I started running again this year. Even when I've done short runs I have still limited the intensity. I believe that long slow distance is the way to become a better runner; as a coach once told me, «just focus on doing the miles and the speed will come.»

Tomorrow I plan to be running in the Statuto Race in North Beach so I don't want to overdo anything today. Yet I didn't want to let another day go by without getting out on the road at least a little, as the last couple of days I haven't run at all. So that poses a dilemma: how to do something challenging enough that there's some fun to it while avoiding wearing myself out with a relatively long distance? I want my legs to be fresh tomorrow morning, not worn out and not stale from four days without running.

Answer: barefooting.

This was my first barefoot run on pavement. I went only a little over a mile so as not to avoid what I've read is the biggest mistake: TMTS, otherwise known as Too Much Too Soon.

This morning I gave barefoot running a try. All but about six-tenths of a mile of todays run were done as laps around Jackson Park. I left the house wearing my Tevas (with a pair of socks in my pocket in case barefoot turned out to be too much and the Tevas chafed. Neither happened. I ran in the sandals down to the park, stashed them behind one of the backstops, and started doing laps.