I’ve spent a week worrying about what I did to myself last Sunday. A week not really knowing if I’d actually done myself any harm or not. I assumed I’d pulled a hamstring, given that the pain was centred in the back of my knee. Well, I say pain, what I really mean is a tightness there. I’d stopped running when I felt a twang, so I probably saved myself any real damage. But what the hell do I know? I’ve never done anything like this before.
Anyway, 6 days later and I was itching to get out there. The weird feeling had stopped the day before and a few running paces around the house landing on my forefoot felt fine. So what harm could it do? I wondered if I should just run around the block and I probably should have done only this, but I didn’t want to start my 3 month build up all over again, so I decided that I would run around the Common (5.7k), but at the first sign of anything not feeling right, I’d stop and walk the rest of the way home.
The blister under the end of my 3rd and 4th metatarsals had now healed, so I was able to resume my natural landing foot strike. I won’t ever try to control this again, as I’m sure this contributed to my problems last week. I also tried to stop concentrating on how my foot landed. I read last week that a mistake all newbie barefoot runners make is to fall for the misconception that “barefoot running means striking the ground with your forefoot and effectively running on your toes”. The advice here was to “Stand up straight and don’t even think about your feet; just let them do their thing and push yourself along with your butt muscles”. Now I’m not really sure what he meant by pushing with your butt muscles, but I think I did understand what he meant you’re not to do – worry about your feet.
I’d not exactly been running on my toes. I learnt early on that your heal must come down at the end of the stride, if only briefly, but I guess I was a little obsessed with using my forefoot-to-heal motion as the shock absorber for my stride. This I think was important in the beginning. In order to learn this style of running, I think you have to start by running on your toes almost. This is to stop you slamming down your heal and injuring yourself. Of course this puts more strain on your calves, achilles and ham strings, but hey, you start slowly don’t you.
Anyway, I noticed along the way that as I got good at this, my feet started to land a little flatter. Looking back I think I’d be fighting against this slightly, when what I should have been doing is forgetting all about it. What I think was happening here was my feet were doing the decision making on how flat they could land depending on what they felt beneath them. The softer the terrain, the flatter my feet would land, the harder, the more they would utilise the spring of my forefoot-to-heal motion. I didn’t have to consciously control this anymore, I just had to “let them do their thing”.
So armed with this new idea, I set out after 6 days off and tried not to think about my feet at all. I ran as much as I could on grass, which I knew would allow my feet to go into soft terrain mode and thus allow them to choose to land flatter, placing less strain on my legs.
It was a good run, I ran about 4k before I started to feel a little tightness in the back of my knee and decided that I should stop just in case. I thought I’d done well to do any running at all only 6 days after my first wobble, so wasn’t going to push it.
Now it’s the following day and I have no problems to report with my ham string, although I do have a little discomfort in my right achilles and calf. But I’ve a plan for that, which I’ll talk about in a later post when I’ve had chance to test it out.