The Experiment

My feet are ugly, and they hurt. Not as much now as they did three months ago, but they still hurt. It seems that I screwed them up, again, running over this past winter and early spring. Most of the time when I develop a running injury, I can tell what I did wrong; but, this time I'm not even sure what I did. Trail running is a passion of mine, not in the sense that I'm the kind of guy doing 100 mile trail races, but I love to feel the wind in my face and get lost on the mountain. Unfortunately, this foot pain is throwing a serious wrench in all of that. So, I'm trying to fix my feet and thus I am doing "The Barefoot Experiment."

There is a lot of buzz about minimalist or barefoot running. A lot of it makes sense to me, though I have always thought it would kill my feet. You know what? My feet don't seem to be doing so hot with what I'm doing, so why not try something crazy. In any case, I got to thinking that the foot is probably a remarkably adaptable structure, and if I I broke into things slowly maybe even MY foot could get stronger and adapt. Maybe I would learn to run softer by running in my bare feet. So, my purpose is three fold, I think. First, I want to see if my foot changes shape as a result of going mostly barefoot. Second, I want to see if I can learn to run softer. And third, I want to see if my feet become stronger and more resilient to going barefoot, thus hopefully less injury prone.

So, I haven't determined the exact length of time for the transition, but probably 30-60 days is reasonable. I am going to gradually transition to going barefoot for as much of the day as possible, and also I am going to SLOWLY ease into running barefoot.

I actually started this yesterday and went barefoot at work for about half the day. Remarkably, my feet probably felt better than they do in shoes. I'm not saying that it was entirely comfortable to walk around on hard tile floors all day in bare feet when not used to it, but I could definitely tell that I was actually walking softer.

Today, I got a little crazier. I actually walked the 0.6-0.7 miles to work barefooted. Some have said that you should walk over a variety of terrain to acclimate your foot to going barefoot, so I tried doing that. Let's just say that I probably looked really stupid, people probably thought I had lost my mind, and it took me a really long time to walk to work because it was pretty uncomfortable at times. I guess that is part of the experiment-to see if my feet become more resilient to that type of thing over time and practice.

This evening, I ran in the grass for about 6 minutes then slowly jogged on the blacktop driveway, concentrating on landing softly. I've been gradually increasing the amount of time spent running barefoot at one time. I started with about 6 minutes and now am at about 10 minutes (over the course of 2-3 weeks). This has mostly been in grass, but I think I might ease onto harder surfaces because they seem to teach one better how to land softly. I'll have to be extra cautious doing that, however, because my feet don't take a joke very well.

I know this is all crazy. I just want my feet to get better. The truth is that, in the grand scheme of things, my foot problems are a very minor issue. I thank God every day that I am not dealing with cancer or some other major health issue. Our lives can change so quickly and one can go from being an Olympic athlete to a quadriplegic in a heartbeat. I also know that my feet and health are not the most important thing in life, following God is. So, I try to keep all this foot stuff in perspective. All that being said, for some reason I thought it would be interesting to keep a record of all this. That's it for now. Off to sleep.