Fun While Running
Sometimes when I run in Portland, Oregon, I go past a number of street people who hang out along the sidewalk by the Williamette River. One lady who has seen me running a number of times always "talks me up" with the people she is with. Its like she's my buddy, now.
The other day I was running through the streets of the city and had to stop for traffic. A guy was standing there and we talked a little bit about barefoot running, why I don't wear shoes, why it doesn't hurt my feet, etc. All at once there was this same lady, my "bag-lady buddy", who seemed to show up out of nowhere. She jumped into the conversation to defend running barefoot! She was saying things like, "It's good for you!" "He runs like this every day!" I got a real kick out of her!
Oh, the joys of running barefoot never cease!
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Reporting Some Barefoot Achievements
I am very happy to report two new achievements for me this week:
First: I ran (barefoot) on a particular course from my home that was very difficult for me when I first tried running it. It has a lot of little gravel rocks strewn over much of the sidewalks and pavement for the first mile. That was followed by a new asphalt bike path that went on for quite some distance. By the time I made it to the nice asphalt, my feet used to get so beat up by the rocks I was not able to enjoy the good part of the run. Then I'd have to return via the same rocky section for a double dose of ouch.
A few days ago I ran the same route and was not even slowed down by the gravel. I just kept true to my form and ran right through/over it. When I got to the asphalt bike path, it felt much smoother than it used to, so I added an extra mile to the course to make it a 5 mile total run.
Second: Today I ran in downtown Portland, Oregon. It has this extremely smooth sidewalk that goes along the Williamette river. Parts of it are fully a 10-rated surface - unbelievably smooth!. Other parts have rougher sidewalks that rate a 7 or 8.
So I ran a 3 mile loop at the fastest pace I've run yet while barefoot, just under 7:00 minute miles. Than I headed up through town across some very rough sidewalks and roads that rate from 3 to 5 in places, for an additional 2 1/2 miles. I focused on form and found that the rougher sections were not only tolerable, they actually felt good! Not too long ago I could barely even walk over them.
At one point I passed a city cop and he yelled, "How far are you running, barefoot!?" I yelled back, "About 6 miles." He said, "You're more of a man than I am!" to which I smiled and waved.
Coming back down out of the city blocks I was going at an accelerated pace, again sailing over some pretty rough sections with ease. Its hard to tell how fast I was averaging because I had to stop and wait for traffic a number of times.
Back down on the waterfront I ran the final 2 mile leg on the smooth stuff, again at a pretty fair clip. My total time running was 65 minutes, which is very encouraging to me, considering all the time I wasted waiting for lights and taking a couple of walking breaks along the way.
I am really excited at the progress I am seeing in my running! I am getting back into condition, my form is coming together, my feet are feeling great, my speed is coming back, and I'm thoroughly enjoying running again. I actually have hope of being able to increase my distances and prepare to run my first in my life marathon. Salt Lake City has a new marathon that's held in late April that is quite a flat course. I'm going to see if I can be ready to try that. If I keep progressing like I am, I might head up north and join the Seattle bunch for Seafair! Vancouver Washington has a 10K in January I might do if I'm in town. It would be my first ever barefoot race.
Hope it doesn't sound like I'm bragging - I'm just so excited that this barefoot stuff is actually working out. I had my doubts at first, but its all becoming seeable for me. Gotta love it!
Ryan
"Vancouver Barefoot"
I am very happy to report two new achievements for me this week:
First: I ran (barefoot) on a particular course from my home that was very difficult for me when I first tried running it. It has a lot of little gravel rocks strewn over much of the sidewalks and pavement for the first mile. That was followed by a new asphalt bike path that went on for quite some distance. By the time I made it to the nice asphalt, my feet used to get so beat up by the rocks I was not able to enjoy the good part of the run. Then I'd have to return via the same rocky section for a double dose of ouch.
A few days ago I ran the same route and was not even slowed down by the gravel. I just kept true to my form and ran right through/over it. When I got to the asphalt bike path, it felt much smoother than it used to, so I added an extra mile to the course to make it a 5 mile total run.
Second: Today I ran in downtown Portland, Oregon. It has this extremely smooth sidewalk that goes along the Williamette river. Parts of it are fully a 10-rated surface - unbelievably smooth!. Other parts have rougher sidewalks that rate a 7 or 8.
So I ran a 3 mile loop at the fastest pace I've run yet while barefoot, just under 7:00 minute miles. Than I headed up through town across some very rough sidewalks and roads that rate from 3 to 5 in places, for an additional 2 1/2 miles. I focused on form and found that the rougher sections were not only tolerable, they actually felt good! Not too long ago I could barely even walk over them.
At one point I passed a city cop and he yelled, "How far are you running, barefoot!?" I yelled back, "About 6 miles." He said, "You're more of a man than I am!" to which I smiled and waved.
Coming back down out of the city blocks I was going at an accelerated pace, again sailing over some pretty rough sections with ease. Its hard to tell how fast I was averaging because I had to stop and wait for traffic a number of times.
Back down on the waterfront I ran the final 2 mile leg on the smooth stuff, again at a pretty fair clip. My total time running was 65 minutes, which is very encouraging to me, considering all the time I wasted waiting for lights and taking a couple of walking breaks along the way.
I am really excited at the progress I am seeing in my running! I am getting back into condition, my form is coming together, my feet are feeling great, my speed is coming back, and I'm thoroughly enjoying running again. I actually have hope of being able to increase my distances and prepare to run my first in my life marathon. Salt Lake City has a new marathon that's held in late April that is quite a flat course. I'm going to see if I can be ready to try that. If I keep progressing like I am, I might head up north and join the Seattle bunch for Seafair! Vancouver Washington has a 10K in January I might do if I'm in town. It would be my first ever barefoot race.
Hope it doesn't sound like I'm bragging - I'm just so excited that this barefoot stuff is actually working out. I had my doubts at first, but its all becoming seeable for me. Gotta love it!
Ryan
"Vancouver Barefoot"
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
A Couple More Running Thoughts:
Cadence is an important aspect of barefoot running. If you try to take long, loping strides, you end up over-striding, which causes extreme friction on the skin, pounding on the bones, and each forward stride stops your forward momentum. By increasing the cadence, you simply don't have time to stretch your foot out in front of you, so instead, you plant your foot directly beneath your body mass. Some runners carry metronomes to help them keep a good cadence going. The best cadence is 180 steps per minute, 3 per second.
I found that by repeating the word "Am-ster-dam" in my head, it helps set the correct cadence. That got boring, so I started looking for other things to repeat.
I thought of a song I had sung in a church choir, which had the words "Ju-bi-la-te, Ju-bi-la-te, Ju-bi-la-te, Ju-bi-lay" with a nice catchy tune. One time I ended up "singing" "Hal-le-lu-jah, Hal-le-lu-jah, Hal-le-lu-jah, Shout Hur-ray!" I don't know where that came from, but either version is not quite as boring as just repeating Amsterdam.
Some others I have come up with are the words to "Onward Christian Soldiers" - at least as many of them as I can remember. Sometimes I forget the words to a song and end up mixing parts of different verses all together, or else just make up words that seem to fit. I don't think anyone who knew the song would recognize it after I was done re-mixing it!
In the Stake choir I sing in, we just started rehearsing a song from Handel's Messiah, so lately I have been "singing" to myself something like, "Forrrr un-to us a Child is gi-ven! (Un-to us) A Child is gi-ven" etc. and "Haaaaa-le-lu-jah! Haaaaa-le-lu-jah! Halle-lu-jah! Halle-lu-jah! Ha-a-a-le-lu-jah!" etc.
Those are fun ones to run to. Since I am doing this in my head only, I can sing the different parts, soprano, alto, tenor, bass - whatever.
Whichever of these tricks I feel like doing, they all seem to work pretty well to keep me on a 180 beat cadence.
When I get one of these things going nicely in my head, when my running form is "on" and my cadence is correct, I sometimes zone-out and am not aware of the passage of time or distance. The other day I was just bee-bopping along and realized I had run almost an entire mile without even noticing my surroundings. There is one section of kind of tricky bridge surface I ran across, and when I "came-to" I had already run over it without even thinking about it!
Happy Trails to You!
Ryan
Cadence is an important aspect of barefoot running. If you try to take long, loping strides, you end up over-striding, which causes extreme friction on the skin, pounding on the bones, and each forward stride stops your forward momentum. By increasing the cadence, you simply don't have time to stretch your foot out in front of you, so instead, you plant your foot directly beneath your body mass. Some runners carry metronomes to help them keep a good cadence going. The best cadence is 180 steps per minute, 3 per second.
I found that by repeating the word "Am-ster-dam" in my head, it helps set the correct cadence. That got boring, so I started looking for other things to repeat.
I thought of a song I had sung in a church choir, which had the words "Ju-bi-la-te, Ju-bi-la-te, Ju-bi-la-te, Ju-bi-lay" with a nice catchy tune. One time I ended up "singing" "Hal-le-lu-jah, Hal-le-lu-jah, Hal-le-lu-jah, Shout Hur-ray!" I don't know where that came from, but either version is not quite as boring as just repeating Amsterdam.
Some others I have come up with are the words to "Onward Christian Soldiers" - at least as many of them as I can remember. Sometimes I forget the words to a song and end up mixing parts of different verses all together, or else just make up words that seem to fit. I don't think anyone who knew the song would recognize it after I was done re-mixing it!
In the Stake choir I sing in, we just started rehearsing a song from Handel's Messiah, so lately I have been "singing" to myself something like, "Forrrr un-to us a Child is gi-ven! (Un-to us) A Child is gi-ven" etc. and "Haaaaa-le-lu-jah! Haaaaa-le-lu-jah! Halle-lu-jah! Halle-lu-jah! Ha-a-a-le-lu-jah!" etc.
Those are fun ones to run to. Since I am doing this in my head only, I can sing the different parts, soprano, alto, tenor, bass - whatever.
Whichever of these tricks I feel like doing, they all seem to work pretty well to keep me on a 180 beat cadence.
When I get one of these things going nicely in my head, when my running form is "on" and my cadence is correct, I sometimes zone-out and am not aware of the passage of time or distance. The other day I was just bee-bopping along and realized I had run almost an entire mile without even noticing my surroundings. There is one section of kind of tricky bridge surface I ran across, and when I "came-to" I had already run over it without even thinking about it!
Happy Trails to You!
Ryan
Postlude to My Birthday Run
I started out with a 6 mile run, proudly wearing my new "It Takes BALLS to Run BAREFOOT" T-shirt. At one point I had to wait for a light to change, and two gangbangers, each with a pit-bull dog with them, read my shirt and got a big kick out of it. I think they respected that I was running barefoot.
Then I got the idea stuck in my head that it would be really cool to go run barefoot on Nike's corporate running track! So I jumped in my car, drove out to Beaverton, Oregon, found Nike's office campus, and tried to get in. Security had another opinion, though, and turned me around back out of there. I thought about maybe parking somewhere up the street a ways and trying to run in, but I couldn't see any other way in except right in front of the nose of the security booth. I still might try that tactic, someday. Actually I know a computer programmer at Nike. Perhaps he can get me a "pass" of some kind. If I do, I'm thinking of making a shirt that says, "Hey, Nike! THIS is Free!" :)
So, defeated by Nike's gargantuan might, I drove back to downtown Portland and ran one more three-mile loop before it started raining/hailing and I called it a day. No personal bests today, but a very fun time was had.
Ryan
I started out with a 6 mile run, proudly wearing my new "It Takes BALLS to Run BAREFOOT" T-shirt. At one point I had to wait for a light to change, and two gangbangers, each with a pit-bull dog with them, read my shirt and got a big kick out of it. I think they respected that I was running barefoot.
Then I got the idea stuck in my head that it would be really cool to go run barefoot on Nike's corporate running track! So I jumped in my car, drove out to Beaverton, Oregon, found Nike's office campus, and tried to get in. Security had another opinion, though, and turned me around back out of there. I thought about maybe parking somewhere up the street a ways and trying to run in, but I couldn't see any other way in except right in front of the nose of the security booth. I still might try that tactic, someday. Actually I know a computer programmer at Nike. Perhaps he can get me a "pass" of some kind. If I do, I'm thinking of making a shirt that says, "Hey, Nike! THIS is Free!" :)
So, defeated by Nike's gargantuan might, I drove back to downtown Portland and ran one more three-mile loop before it started raining/hailing and I called it a day. No personal bests today, but a very fun time was had.
Ryan
Monday, November 07, 2005
Today is my birthday - 52 years old!I am going out and treating myself to a noon-time run, hopefully to score a personal best barefoot distance. My best run so far has been 12 miles barefoot. I generally go for 6 miles per run.
Its a grey, drizzly, colder day today. The bank sign outside my office window says 48 degrees F. (8.8 C) Weather forecasters are saying there is a chance for thunder - kind of rare in these parts. So maybe Nature will be clapping its encouragement of my little exploit!
I made a do-it-yourself tshirt that says, "It Takes BALLS To Run BAREFOOT" with some images of green sole-prints with the balls of the feet colored brown and with RunningBarefoot.Org across the bottom. (See above.) If its not raining too hard I'll wear that just for fun.
Talk to you all later!
Ryan
Vancouver Barefoot
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