Mission: Parkrun

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It’s now been nine months since I’ve ran, and there was a sixteen month hiatus before that. So I’ve some catching up to do. This last gap in my running was caused by trying too hard too fast to step up my distance and I ended up with a possible sprain in the top of my right foot.

So now I’m starting again… yet again. I’ve not been lazy in the meantime. As I couldn’t run, I started swimming every day instead. Now the weather is finally improving in the UK, it’s time to add running back to that mix, probably in the evening as I’d really like my morning swim now that it’s become a habit.

My current enthusiasm comes from setting myself a goal to do the local Parkrun barefoot. Easy you’d think. Well as I’ve discovered many times before, you can’t just run 5k barefoot. Well, you can, but you’ll spend the following week not being able to walk or descend stairs. So I plan to build the distance up over the next month or so to 5k or just under. This time I won’t run every single day, this time I’ll alternate the days, at least to start with, to allow my body some recovery time. I reserve the right to alter this plan as I go, but this is were I am with it now. Hopefully by April, or May at the latest, I’ll be in a position to do that 5k Parkrun in Richmond Park on a Saturday morning. Once I’ve cracked that once, I hope to run it every week. But that’s getting a little ahead of myself.

Over the past ten days I’ve been out for four short 1km runs, and so far, so good. Nothing has broken as yet and I’ve still been swimming every day too. It feels good to be back outside running again. I should have gotten back to this months ago, but the foul weather didn’t particularly encourage that.

Wish me luck.

Foot Sprain… Arrrh!

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So my latest running spurt, after a 16 month hiatus, has hit the buffers… for now anyway.

It is almost of no surprise to me that I’ve managed to do overdo it yet again. I’ve sprained my right foot, causing me to stop all running until it’s recovered. It’s completely my own fault. I failed to obey rule #1: Listen to your body. Although looking back I can see how I’ve managed to do this.

My return to running was mainly prompted by a wish to rid myself once again of the dreaded planter facetious (PF), or as I’ve said before what should more correctly be called planter fasciosis. Running (in a barefoot style) cures this. So as I eagerly adopted my short everyday runs again, I could really feel the tendons working though my right heel, as it worked the lymphatic system to pump away the waste and restore health to my foot and heel. This is an odd experience, as it’s almost like mild pain, but yet it feels good. As if your body is telling you that the discomfort is worth it. As is the case with shod runners, it’s easy to ignore any pain while running by tapping into the fight or flight response. This isn’t something you have to consciously do, it just happens. Your body effectively self-medicates with adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol. Numbing the pain and allowing you to continue running. But this ‘pain’ I experienced was just mild discomfort which would go away in time as my PF got better.

This was the plan, however I didn’t count on me over doing it, and the PF discomfort being replaced with the pain from a foot sprain in the mid-foot. I did notice the area of discomfort move forward, but in my mind associated this with the PF. This was a mistake as it turns out. I should have recognised the symptoms of a sprain and rested my foot immediately – I didn’t, and carried on running unaware I was just compounding the problem. Of course I didn’t really notice when running, due to the aforementioned drugs my body was generating. I did notice when not running, most particularly when my foot had been inactive for a while: upon waking; after sitting at a desk for hours; etc. In between times it didn’t really bother me that much. Hardly at all in fact. I was only that this started to get worse, which alerted me to the fact that this wasn’t my PF but something different. I stopped running right away and have been careful to rest my foot as much as possible.

So let’s see where I went wrong. My progress was as follows:

10 days at 0.36 km
7 days at 0.60 km ~ 60% increase*
7 days at 0.85 km ~ 41% increase*
9 days at 1.3 km ~ 53% increase*
8 days at 1.9 km ~ 46% increase*
3 days at 2.2 km ~ 15% increase*
*percentage increase only worked out when writing this blog

It’s clear to me now that this was too much too fast. Perhaps if I’d not had the PF to start with then this would have been acceptable, or perhaps not. I’d also been experimenting with altering my walking gait. This involves using more of your reverse stride, rather than your forward stride, and does exercise the mid-foot more than a conventional gait (more on my barefoot walking gait experiments in their own post shortly). So maybe this was to blame, or a combination of the two .

But for now I think it’s interesting to just look at the running and to realise how much I stepped up the distance in terms of percentage. On average I was increasing the distance at 50% each time. Most people who talk about increasing the distance for barefoot running talk about stepping up only 10% at a time. If that advice is correct I was smashing that. I’d not considered the percentage increase when I was upping the distance, only using the next convenient road loop and working out the distance I ran later from my tracker band.

So, I’ve now stopped running to recover and the recovery is going well. I’ve been stopped for 4 weeks now and I guess it may take another 8 weeks before I try again. Annoyingly sprains tend the take about the same time as a fracture to repair; 3 months at least. So I’ll take it easy and consider this last progress plan when starting out again.

I always knew that learning to run barefoot would be period of discovery and re-education; I just had no idea that, as with all life’s learning, the eduction never ends.

PF, Goa and Richmond

adamUncategorized 4 Comments

I’ve had a running hiatus of around 16 months; my how the time has flown. I won’t bore you with the reasons for this gap; suffice to say that it wasn’t intentional, it was circumstances in my personal life to blame (having a mad girlfriend, if you must know). But now I’m back on the wagon again, and have just completed my first month of running each morning.

But before I tell you about that, let me first fill you in on a few discoveries first.

My barefoot running journey, this blog, and this website all started with a few unrelated things happening:

  • Being diagnosed with Planter Facetious [PF] (7 June 2011)
  • Taking a holiday in Goa (Nov/Dec 2011)
  • Seeing a feature on a TV program (7 January 2012)

I noticed after spending two weeks on holiday wearing mainly sandals (zero drop as it turned out) that my PF had gone, at least for the moment. Two weeks later I saw a feature on a TV magazine show, which prompted me to google ‘barefoot running’ – I never looked back.

So fast forward to now and I’ve not run for over a year, and guess what? Yep, the PF has returned.

As it happened, back in February I found myself back in Goa, three years on from my previous PF discovery. I wondered on the flight out there if once again my PF would be cured again (albeit temporarily) by not wearing shoes. And this time, I’d be completely barefoot and not in sandals. I believed that the PF would subside, but I didn’t expect this to only take 48 hours. That’s right, when I woke up on my third full day there, I noticed zero pain in my right heel. The PF pain just didn’t exist anymore.

This didn’t initially make any sense. At home I exclusively wear barefoot shoes, or no shoes at all. Why then when my foot muscles were already getting a natural workout, did being in Goa on holiday make such a difference? The answer it seemed was the terrain and the lack of even barefoot shoes.

Back home, living in London, the terrain is anything but natural. Paved streets, carpeted rooms, etc. Everything is flat, flat, flat. Whereas walking around on the beach in Goa, my feet had to contend with surfaces like this.


Looking towards Sundowner Bar and Monkey island (Canacona island) – Palolem Beach, Goa, India.

 

I wasn’t walking on flat terrain, I was walking on varied terrains, including a lot of walking on the hard packed sand left behind by the outgoing tide. This gave me feet a real workout; far greater than I’d ever get wearing barefoot shoes in a concrete jungle like London. For all the exercises recommended for dealing with PF; stretches, rolling a golf ball underfoot, etc., etc. It seems that walking around on uneven ground barefoot for two days is all it takes to mitigate the problem.

This ‘cure’ however didn’t last long. It lasted the whole three weeks I was in Goa, but returned the very next day upon my return to Blighty. One day travelling; inactive and walking on airport concourses and airplane carpets was all it took to return my PF to what it had been before. Amazing how fast this turn around was in both directions.

So, my return to London also coincided with my move further out from London; Clapham to Richmond. I was determined to start running again with this change of scenery. That’s exactly what I’ve done. I was also keen this time to learn (yet again) from all the mistakes of the past and manage my transition from zero running to something manageable every morning. I couldn’t care less about distance in one outing. I’m aiming for distance over time and getting out there and working my legs every day.

So far my progress has been this: (super slow I know, but no calf or other issues)

10 days at 0.36 km
7 days at 0.60 km
7 days at 0.85 km
7 days at 1.3 km

These distance weren’t exactly planned, they just happened to be the distance of the circuit I choose as a small, and then increasing circle run, mainly based on where the paths are around where I’m now living in Richmond. Tomorrow I should really step this distance up again slightly. Let’s see if I do.

Also I know the history of these distances, not because I noted it down (as I’ve done before on a spreadsheet) but because I’ve now acquired an activity tracker – bought for trying out the MAF Method – but more on that in a later dedicated post.

So… so far so good. I’ve been running again for a month with no problems with either my PF or my calves. I’m hoping that this regular running will activate my lymphatic system and sort out my PF – it hasn’t yet, but watch this space.