Wednesday 7 November 2012

Moving past the honeymoon

It's been a while since the revelation of minimalist running...

Everything you read about it suggests that you're likely to over do it and end up injured, and so from day one I took it easy. My mileage went from around 40 a week to 10, and that was REALLY hard to do. I don't run for competition, so the drop in mileage didn't compromise any race plans. I run for the pleasure, both physical and mental and losing that daily time out on the trail was hard. Although the different feeling of running the trails with a minimal shoe made it difficult to stop. Even now the feeling makes me grin.

I slowly built up my mileage back to 40 odd miles a week, and I think my longest run was about 15 miles. But it was ridiculously hard on my lower legs. I can chuckle now at my stupidity, at my inability to walk first thing in the morning and pain for most of the day. Of course it was only muscular pain so my legs would get used to it eventually; right? Wrong!

At the 500 mile point I simply had to take a month off because mileage was decreasing and the soreness wasn't going, oh and tendinitis was beginning to show itself again.

But now I'm back into it. Rather than repeating the last 500 miles as I'm prone to doing (run, injure, rest, run, injure, rest etc) I've bought my XT Wings back into the mix, and ensuring that I don't run with the same shoe 2 runs in a row (Vivo's, XT Wings, VFFs) seems to be really helping. Oh and resting. I'm no longer punishing myself if I don't run for a couple of days.

But I can't help myself if the weather is dire. You simply can't beat getting out in the cold wind and rain. The harder the better and all that.