Week 29

• Total weekly miles

35ish miles.

• Number of running sessions

5 (3×60 minutes, 1×80 minutes, 1×120 minutes)

• Total weekly barefoot mile

5ish miles.

• Number of barefoot running sessions

1.

• Running terrain

Mostly flat, on a mixture of pavement, dirt tracks and road.

• Ground surface of barefoot runs

Mixture of pavement, grass and dirt tracks, again, I tried to stay on pavement as much as possible.

• Runs in minimalist shoes, e.g. Five Fingers.

Lunas when not barefoot.

• Weather for barefoot runs (rain on road?)

Dry weather for my barefoot run this week.  Generally, the weather has been better this week than last, although I did get caught out in a downpour once.

• Condition of skin on feet — hotspots, blisters

Managed to develop a hotspot on both feet just under my little toe after running on pavement for almost an hour in warm, dry conditions.  Strange that I can run for almost 2 hours barefoot in the wet with no problems, yet half of that time in the dry left me with quite sore feet.  After a few days, the hotspot on my left foot developed into a blood blister about the size of a 10p piece during my long run (the one on my right foot went away after a couple of days).  Funnily enough, I didn’t notice this until after my run.  Popped it with a sterile needle and it’s now fine.  No other problems!  I kept my sandals on for running this week to try and help my feet heal, hence the low barefoot mileage.

• Interesting/amusing comments received during the week: e.g. ‘You’ve got no shoes on!’

A couple of nods from other runners again.  I saw one other person running barefoot too.  So there are at least 3 other barefoot runners in my area!

• Treading on nasty things: e.g. glass, thorns, poo — how you dealt with any

Trod on a glass shard while wearing my Lunas the other day. The glass actually went straight through my sandal, but only scratched my foot.  I’m half glad I was wearing my sandals, because the first thought that goes through your mind in this situation is “what if I was barefoot?”  It was  a pretty nasty shard of glass, after all.  But on the other hand, if I had been barefoot, I would have been paying more attention to where I was going, so I might have seen the glass and avoided it altogether.  I guess I’ll never know!  As it was, I just popped the glass out of my sandal and carried on.

• Changes in your running style that you’ve noticed.

It feels like I’m getting the hang of running at 144bpm with a quicker cadence now.  My cadence feels like it’s returning to what it was before I started the heart rate training.  However, when I’ve mapped out my runs to find how far I’ve gone, I’m actually covering slightly less ground than I was with a crappy running style in the last couple of weeks.  So my style is improving, but my distance is falling slightly.  I’m not sure what to do about this, so I’ve decided to more-or-less ignore distance over the next couple of weeks and focus on running for a set amount of time with good form.  That’s why my distance this week is an estimate.  I also started to find myself getting too hung up on how far I was going in the time I gave myself to run, could I go as far as last week in an hour, and all that kind of thing.  I think that’s actually counter productive when running to heart rate, you get anxious or excited about the distance, your heart rate rises, and you end up going slower to make up for it.  That might be part of it too.  We’ll see.

• Injuries incurred, or reduction of existing symptoms.

Calf is now fine after last week’s tweak.  No other injuries.

• Useful tips and nuggets of info you’ve picked up along the way.

Original Lunas suck in the mud.  I actually fell over this week when I got caught out in the rain on a muddy trail.  Luckily no-one was around to hear my language…  The soles of the sandals have no tread on them at all, and if the mud gets between your foot and the sole (as it did to me) then you’re finished, because there’s no traction between the sandal and the ground, and no traction between your foot and the sandal.  I had to finish that section of the run barefoot, which wasn’t much better.  I’ll have to work on my mud running technique…