Steer clear of the broken Corona bottles

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.

As I incor­po­rate bare­foot runs into my rather lais­sez-faire train­ing pro­gram I am try­ing to be very care­ful. Keep the runs (at least those on pave­ment) short and infre­quent, and grad­u­al­ly do a lit­tle more. Last time I went out bare­foot I did just one mile. Today it was 1.3 miles. While I don’t think I’d have any prob­lem doing six or even more miles run­ning on grass and dirt, pave­ment is anoth­er sto­ry. What I don’t want is some kind of overuse injury from using mus­cles I don’t use in padded shoes.

One thing is becom­ing clear: going down­hill bare­foot is very dif­fi­cult and uncom­fort­able. It’s dif­fi­cult for me to avoid slam­ming my heel into the pave­ment going down­hill, while uphill and on flats it seems easy. When I do that, the impact just shoots up my leg in a very unfor­tu­nate way. Even­tu­al­ly I’m sure I’ll find the tech­nique for safe­ly and com­fort­ably run­ning down a hill bare­foot, but «even­tu­al­ly» has­n’t hap­pened yet.

Run­ning bare­foot has one oth­er intend­ed ben­e­fit for tomor­row. By neces­si­ty, any bare­foot run at this point for me is to work on form. This could­n’t be a dis­tance run as I’ve men­tioned and for sim­i­lar rea­sons it should­n’t be a speed run. It’s a run where I pay atten­tion only to my form.

That’s not to say that I have good form; I don’t. I’m all over the place out on the road. Nev­er­the­less, the more I do it the more glimpses of what might be prop­er run­ning form I get. Sud­den­ly I’ll real­ize that I’m mov­ing more smooth­ly or more quick­ly (or both) than I’m used to and with luck, some­times I’m able to keep doing what­ev­er it is and make adjust­ments to my habits.

Pro­pri­o­cep­tion isn’t the only thing one devel­ops when bare­foot­ing. Exter­nal per­cep­tion has to be dialed up a notch (or three) as well. There’s all sorts of stuff out there I don’t want to step on. Today I avoid­ed bro­ken glass at three places along my short run. That’s the sort of thing that makes me want to get a pair of Vibram Fivefin­gers but for now I’m just keep­ing my eyes peeled. No music while run­ning bare­foot, just get as present to the sit­u­a­tion as is pos­si­ble and go.

I’m pret­ty cer­tain today was­n’t too much. My body isn’t com­plain­ing too loud­ly, so I think I did all right. It’s a low mileage num­ber, but that is just what I need­ed today.