I haven’t run since Saturday and I’m starting to go nuts. Thanks to some extremely painful shin splints from basketball and now a budding sinus infection, they only workouts I’ve completed, save a seven-mile bike ride and volleyball, are the 100 pushups program.
I feel lazy. Sure, I know that I’m sick and run down and that rest will help my cause, but that doesn’t make me feel any better mentally. My mind has started to crave the release that running gives me and I just can’t replace it with anything else that doesn’t completely physically exhaust me. But enough of that.
Let’s talk about blisters.
My first and only injury (pain and injury are different, pain hurts but has no long term effects, injuries get worse if you continue to work out while afflicted) suffered in my barefoot running experience. While I’ve certainly burned my feet a few times, both barefoot and through my Sprints, the burns are so similar to blisters that I can’t tell the difference unless I inspect them. Besides, most of the blisters are from friction, which is just like a blister.
The blisters have appeared routinely on the inside part of the ball of each foot, and the burns on the outside of such. When I first ran barefoot, I’d get blisters just below my middle and ring toes on either foot, but usually my right. They were annoying and they were painful, but they were extremely important.
Blisters tell you where you’re landing AND where your feet are moving too much.
This realization, while extremely simple and obvious, floored me. Running in regular shoes had previously taught me that I run heel first, judging by the wear on the outside of the heel. That’s it. That’s all I knew. This new wealth of information showed me that my foot was pushing off (when the blisters were at the top near my toes) landing too far inside (when the blisters were inside), trying to run too fast (blisters on the outside, showing that I was over striding) and when my cadence was too slow (blisters on the bottom of the ball of my foot, meaning I was rolling my feet to try and keep up instead of picking it up like I should be).
Trainer? Psh. I didn’t need a trainer. I could solve my problems by looking up those various stride issues and correcting them the next time I ran. I was my own man! I had made it! I could easily do this. My discovery happened in mid-November and assured me that I’d be easily able to run the Phoenix half marathon in my Vibrams. Few months to get the hang of this?
No problem. Right?
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