While waiting for the shoes to arrive, a bit more about the motivation to switch to barefoot. Three bits of motivation in fact.
So why barefoot running? I never really had big running related injuries, apart from a few ankle twisting, but nothing serious. On the other side, I frequently had and still have now minor feelings, they don't reach the painful or disturbing level, but they are still there. Specially in the lower back. Nothing really serious, too disturbing, but just annoying. Small sensations below the feet, on the knee, or hips, some back pain too. And not all the time, but enough to be disturbing. I am sure a lot of runners out there are feeling the same. This of course might be linked to my job, which requires me to be sitting all day, specially the back pain. And I have to say that running might help, it feels like it gets better after running. However, I also have recurring sensations that are definitively linked to running, in the sole of the foot, the knee cap, or the hips. Once, I even went to one of those sophisticated machine where you run on a detector which supposedly tells you what you are doing right or wrong, and of course, which type of expensive shoe you need to buy. Needless to say that the expansive shoe I bought didn't change anything at all to my running, my time or my injuries. So one hope is that barefoot running will alleviate or even make disappear those sensations, by being more gentle on the articulations. I will keep you informed on the evolution of those things.
One, the first motivation, is to get read of theses running related issues.
The second motivation, is related to the first one. It is running a sub-three. Once you get serious about running, after running a few marathon below 3h30, the sub-three becomes a possibility. I would guess that most marathon runners dream to run at least once below 3h. When I began to get serious about running, this obviously began to tickle me. However, I could not. I cannot say “No matter how hard I tried”, because that is exactly it, I couldn't try harder. I seemed to have reached my physical limit. I don't mean my muscle limits, but more like the bones-joins limit. When I tried to increase my weekly time or distance, I began to run into body problems, mostly related to joins, hips, knee or even sole of the feet. Articulations pain, micro-fracture, ... all those started to kick in, clearly running related. So it really feels that I had reached my physical limits with shoes. Let's see if barefoot affords me to break the 3h. First test will be in 6 months.
As a first test to run a marathon below 3h, you should try to run a half marathon in less than 90 minutes. I already tried that many times, specifically the last two, where I though I was pretty well trained, in good shape and close to my physical limits of training. Well, I got close, 1h35 and 1h32, but impossible to go below 1h30 on the half. So I hope that I can run barefoot a half marathon just 2 minutes faster. I give myself 6 months to get ready to run a half marathon barefoot. If I can just finish it barefoot, I will be happy. But if I can finish it below 90', that will be very nice. And that would mean a lot for those shoes.
So, first test in six months, end of April, Heidelberg half marathon. Of course, the real test would be latter on to run a full marathon below 3h. At 40 years old, that would be pretty good.
The second motivation is thus to run faster, or as I said in an earlier post, to be more efficient in my training.
Third motivation in the next post. Can you guess what it is? As a hint, I can tell you that I am a scientist.
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