Blog<Random> Writing, Weight Loss, and Running Barefoot

Just some stuff I've been thinking about.

Writing

I'm a little embarrassed by the story I posted yesterday. There's a kind of self-conscious debilitation that usually prevents me from writing as soon as the idea pops into my head. Like I'm a hack, trying to keep my secret from everyone. It's part of the reason for this post, to push the story down a little, off the front page. At least now people will have to click a link or scroll down to find it.

But, I liked the idea, and if I didn't write it down, it would be rotting in my brain. And if I didn't post it here, it would be rotting on my hard drive. Now it can rot on the internet.

Your welcome, the internet.

Personal embarrassment aside, please fire away with your critiques. I'd like to get better, so don't hold back. After writing this one, I've got a few ideas along the same lines (immortality, fear of dying, existence, etc...), and I'd like to not feel quite as embarrassed the next time.

Weight Loss

I'm a week or two away from my goal. If it weren't for the 4th of July weekend (gained about 3 lbs!), I'd probably be there already. But I knew I'd have to work off all the food before I ate it, so it wasn't really a surprise. Once you get comfortable with your diet and exercise plan, the only thing that really surprises you is when you lose more than you thought you would. There's always an explanation for weight gain.

On the motivation front, the past couple of weeks have been difficult to keep a schedule. The week before the 4th of July, I only got 3 workouts in. Then, we got back from the vacation on Tuesday, so I only had 3 days this past week. On Thursday, I almost skipped my resistance training (I hate weight lifting.) I was halfway to my car before I made myself turn around and go back to the gym.

Hopefully this week I'll get a solid 5 days in (plus a run on Saturday), because I'll be going on vacation again the following week. It would be nice to put this goal to bed by then.

Running Barefoot

Last week, I went for a run in my Vibrams. I could feel some slight shin splints pain almost immediately. I ran for about 1/4 of a mile and decided to start changing up my form to see if it would make a difference.

I bent my knees more (kind of like sitting in a high chair, with your feet hanging down to touch the ground.) I also focused on moving forward instead of springing up and down. I noticed an improvement right away. The shin pain didn't go away, but I could tell that I wasn't making it any worse. I kept up this new form for about another half mile before it started slipping. The remaining 1/4 mile back to the house was a battle of concentration.

The experience of changing my form and feeling relief was pretty exciting. I opened my favorite web browser and found a pretty awesome site about barefoot running. The founder of that site, a caveman-looking dude called Barefoot Ken Bob, has run over 75(!) marathons completely barefoot. He recommends not wearing minimal shoes (like the Vibrams) when you are just starting out because, even though they're thin, the sole keeps your foot from feeling the ground and still allows you to pound a little.

He was right! This morning, I decided to do half of my mile run completely barefoot. I could tell immediately that my form in the Vibrams wasn't as smooth or low-impact as I thought. I know that I've gushed about the feeling you get in the Vibrams before, but it really doesn't compare to actually going barefoot.

I'll probably write more about it next week, but if you are thinking about taking up running in minimal footwear, I highly recommend trying it completely barefoot. Just remember that the goal is not to push through any pain you feel, it's to avoid pain. And you can only avoid pain by improving your form and by slowly building up your endurance. So, don't go further than your feet are ready for. 1/2 a mile was my limit today.

Blog<Running> Learning To Walk

In my previous 2 posts about running I talked about taking it slow, listening to my body, maintaining proper form, and not injuring myself. That progress would be slow, but eventually I would be able to run longer distances, pain free. It turns out that progress is even slower than I first thought.

In that last blog post, I outlined my plans for strengthening my flat feet. I would cut back on the running attempts and wear my Vibrams every day at the gym. After my feet got stronger, hopefully my shin splints would be under control, and I would be able to start running for longer and more frequently.

Stumbling Block

Over the week following that post, I started feeling pain in my feet. I'm not talking pain from impact, or general soreness from using the muscles in my feet. This felt more serious. It was like the shin splints moved from my shins down into my ankles and feet. But it was worse than shin splints because instead of only feeling pain when I walked, I also felt it while just standing or sitting too long in the same position. There were two spots on each foot (on the inside and outside, just below the ankle) where it hurt to touch, almost like a bruise.

Looking back on my plans, I'm reminded of the Greek proverb:

Learn to walk before you run.

I think I was asking too much of my feet, too soon. They've been locked up in rigid shoes for my whole life, and I was expecting them to magically get stronger in a few weeks. I didn't want to aggravate them any more (and it hurt to walk around anyway), so I took a week off from working out. Last week, when I started back, I wore my cross-trainers instead of my Vibrams on the elliptical machine. Until this morning, I hadn't run at all in 3 weeks.

Getting Back Up

For the past couple of days, my foot pain has gone away completely (the human body is kind of incredible like that.) So, this morning I attempted a run. I was able to go about 3/4 of a mile without pain, and then I decided to stop before hurting anything. After my run, on my short cool-down walk, I started feeling some pain again in my ankles, so I'm glad I stopped when I did.

If you don't learn from your mistakes, you're doomed to repeat them, so I'm changing gears for what seems like the 5th time. I need to slow down again, and this time test the waters a little before jumping in with both feet.

My plan for this week is to continue wearing my cross-trainers on the elliptical machine, but wear my Vibrams on my 2 weight days. I'm still going barefoot at home and wearing sandals when I have to go out in public. Then, if my feet feel okay next weekend, I'll go for another run. I'll run until I start feeling pain, or until I reach the .8 mile mark.

I'll keep doing this (gradually increasing my run distance if I can) until I can go a full week without foot pain. Then, I'll start replacing my cross-trainers with my Vibrams on some of my elliptical days, and replace at least 1 elliptical day with a run instead. By the end of August I'll hopefully be able to throw away the cross-trainers for good.

I'm sure there are flaws in this new plan as well, but it's good to have a goal to work towards. I'll be keeping this blog up to date as I make progress.

Some Miscellaneous Observations

There are a few things I noticed over the past 3 weeks that didn't really fit into the text above, but I feel like they might be useful to put in writing.

1) The elliptical machine. The strange thing about the elliptical machine is that it's a rigid, defined motion. Your foot moves maybe an inch inside its stirrup (that seems like an apt description of the thing that keeps your feet attached to the machine) over the course of several cycles. It's almost like wearing shoes outside of your shoes. So when I wear the Vibrams instead of my cross-trainers, it doesn't really feel any different. At the same time, my almost-naked foot doesn't really feel "right" in the stirrup. I have more range of motion in my foot because of the Vibrams, but I'm still performing the same movements over and over for 50-60 minutes.

I think it was this repetitive motion that caused me a lot of the pain over the past 3 weeks. Without any variation in terrain, my foot's ligaments and joints were just grinding back and forth, back and forth, over-training very specific muscles, ligaments, and tendons in my feet. Since the pain went away literally days after I switched back to my cross-trainers, I'm pretty confident that this was the case.

The conundrum is that most of my strength training workouts involve sitting or lying down. The only time I'm on my feet is during my elliptical workouts. To improve my foot strength, I need to be doing more, but not so much that I over train and injure myself. The best plan would probably involve stopping partway through my elliptical workout and switching shoes, but who wants to change shoes in the middle of the gym? Sometimes I think to myself that if I get off the machine now, it's not very likely that I'll get back on. So hopefully my plan of mixing in one day of elliptical with the Vibrams will allow me to get there gradually.

#2 Conflicting Goals. I have two fitness-related goals at the moment. For the past 6 months, I've been trying to lose a specific amount of weight. And for the past month and a half, I've been trying to become a runner. The problem is that in order to lose weight at a quick pace, I need to burn a lot of calories during my workouts; and since I'm a newbie runner, I can't use my runs yet to replace a cardio workour. Furthermore, the setbacks I've experienced so far while running have crossed over to the weight-loss side. When I took a week off to let my feet heal up, I had to stop my weight-loss training as well. Fortunately, I'm only a few weeks away from meeting my weight-loss goal (5-6 more lbs) and I can start focusing more on running.

#3 Perseverance. In the past, I would have given up on the running a long time ago. As soon as I felt the shin splints the first time, or the foot pain from the past few weeks, I would have probably thrown in the towel. For whatever reason, I seem to have turned a page mentally. I've been able to stick with the weight loss, I've been able to stick with the running (even though there have been few victories), and after a month of I've also been able to stick to updating this blog at least once a week. Hopefully the feeling decides to stick around for a while.

Blog<Running> Part 2

If you managed to get through part 1, you were probably wondering what my history with swimming, my recent motivation to lose weight, and my newfound interest in running have to do with each other. Well, here it is:

Why Running?

The elliptical machine is a great tool for working out. It's low impact, it has a variable resistance, it's climate controlled, it's about 15 feet from a large tank of cold water, and it's green (the one I use is powered by the cycling motion).

It's also incredibly boring. If it weren't for several podcast subscriptions, I wouldn't be able to motivate myself to workout every day for 30 minutes, let alone 60-90 minutes. It's stationary, it's the same motion minute after minute, day after day, month after month, and honestly, I started getting tired of measuring my progress with calorie counts, or watts, or cycles per minute, or even heart rate.

I wanted to do something where I wasn't just running in place. Where I could go for a while and let my body tell me how hard I was working and shut all of that other stuff out. I thought about swimming, but it's just too inconvenient. By the time you drive to the pool and get changed you've already wasted 30 minutes. Then, you have to find an open lane (or share with someone willing). Once you're done you have to take a shower, change and drive home. That's another 30 minutes gone. Swimming is something that I enjoy, but if I've learned anything from my recent weight loss it's that you have to put yourself in the best possible situation to succeed. For now, swimming just doesn't fit the bill.

So I still needed to find my convenient, low impact, cardiovascular exercise. Cycling is too much of an investment (and between you and me, traveling great distances is a recipe for getting lost). Rowing? What is rowing? How does a person even start rowing? Basketball, tennis, soccer? They all require coordination with other people, and wouldn't necessarily let me go at my own pace. And they are also not very "low impact". So, what's left?

Well, for a couple of months now, I've been reading various articles about the evolution of the human foot, and about how modern shoes make our feet weak and more prone to injury. Then I started seeing people post about their Vibram FiveFingers on facebook and twitter.

My interest was officially piqued, but I have always had problems with running. Also, how the hell does using less cushioning translate to a lower impact?

Running Form

This is the first piece of advice I normally receive when I ask how to be a better runner: get proper running shoes, with a big padded heel and a stiff high arch for your flat feet. In the past, I would try to follow this advice. I would get the shoes and start running, and for the first 3 or 4 runs I would be fine. Then I would start developing shin splints, or I would roll my ankle (even with the rigid support of the shoes). Then, after a couple more painful runs, I would stop altogether. After a few rounds of trying and failing, I eventually gave up for good.

But recently, I started seeing all of these articles about people running pain free, either barefoot or in their Vibrams. Even people like me who have flat feet and suffer from chronic shin splints and weak ankles.

I went on a research bender. I found a bunch of websites and blogs with information about minimal or barefoot running. I read the research on impact of heel strikes versus forefoot/midfoot strikes. I discovered how running can be "low impact".

The gist of it is that your foot has more nerve endings in it than any other place in your body (well, technically there is a place where they are more concentrated, but it's probably not as big as your feet). These nerves are there to tell your brain what you are stepping on, so that your brain can tell your feet how to keep moving safely. Your primary contact with the outside world is through your feet, so having that connection is important. It's an extremely sensitive feedback loop that has been honed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

When you wrap your feet in a big padded shoe, you are cutting off this feedback loop. The problem is that your feet still want to "feel" what they are running on. Add more padding, and you have a tendency to pound your foot down on the ground. Your brain is trying to push your foot through all that rubber, or gel, or air cushioning so that it can figure out the safest/most efficient way to move. Well, now, you are literally stomping the ground with every step, so it's no wonder that running is so high impact.

Now take off your shoes and run. Pounding the ground for even 100 steps will be incredibly painful. You will naturally become more careful about how you land because you want to minimize the impact that you feel. You will also begin to realize that landing on the front of your foot is easier than the heel. This is because all of the force of the impact will be handled by the soft tissue in your feet and legs (tendons and muscles), instead of the hard tissue (bone and cartilage). Your soft tissue has this miraculous ability to stretch and store energy. So instead of just absorbing the impact in your joints, you're compressing and storing the energy in the natural springs in your feet and legs. Energy that will be released when you follow through with your stride.

That's the theory anyway. There's actually not a lot of scientific research in this area. Just anecdotal evidence, and that common sense light bulb in your head blinking "no shit".

Running: First Attempt

So, using this knowledge, I finally decided to go out for a run in my old New Balance cross trainers (the closest thing I have to a shoe that I could reasonably exercise in), focusing on landing with a forefoot strike instead of a heel strike. I ran/walked for about 2 miles until my calves were on fire and I couldn't go any further. I didn't feel any shin pain though, so a couple days later I went for another run. This time, I was able to go a little further, but I started to feel the familiar pain of shin splints coming on.

Not wanting to give up, I did more research. I found that shin splints have many causes, one of them being flat feet. When your foot has a weak arch (or low arch) it tends to roll inward more than usual when you land on it. This pulls and stretches one of the muscles that attaches to the inside part of your shin bone. This constant stretching causes the muscle to start tearing away from the bone, which is what causes the pain in some types of shin splints. It also just happens to be the same part of my shin that hurts after running.

Okay, so all I need to do is fix my flat feet.

Running: Second Attempt

More research. Again, there is no scientific evidence to prove (or disprove) what I'm about to say, but the ideas resonate with that same "no shit" feeling. Shoes and orthotics with high, rigid arches (made for people with flat feet) cause your feet to weaken. If you rely on some external structure to fix your arch, then your foot's muscles start to atrophy. Eventually, you will completely rely on the arch support. When you take off your shoes and stand upright, your feet roll inward because you are not used to standing without the external support. The shoes actually make your flat feet worse.

So, the "solution" is to train your foot to support itself again. Time to lose the rigid shoes and go natural.

Well, almost. Since I wasn't ready to take the plunge into barefoot running, I went out and bought a pair of Vibram Sprints. They feel like you aren't wearing anything. You have full range of motion of the entire foot (including toes), and there is absolutely no arch support. The only thing between your foot and the ground is about 5 mm of flexible rubber. You feel every twig, pebble, and crack in the sidewalk. Interestingly, you start avoiding the dangerous things you would normally step on while wearing shoes.

So last Saturday, I went for a jog in the Vibrams. I'd been told to not go more than half a mile for the first run, and that was good advice. It was over in about 5 minutes. Just long enough to start falling in love with the "shoes", and not so long that I was in pain. The freedom I felt in the Vibrams was amazing. It reminded me of what it felt like to run around barefoot in the grass as a kid. In that brief half mile, running was fun. On top of all that, I didn't feel any more pain in my shins.

After my first experience with the Vibrams, I bought and read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. Upon reading it, if you are like me, you will immediately want to go out and run a 100 mile race through the mountains. So, I impatiently went out and ran 2 more half miles in the next 3 days. That was a mistake. I ended up aggravating my shin splints from my first (shod) running attempt from the previous week, and I started feeling pain in my knees. The thought of miraculously becoming a runner made me go out way too fast and way too hard.

I got a much-needed reality check.

Today

After my ill-fated attempt to run for the past 2 weeks, I decided to take it slower. I gave myself 3 and a half days off from running and threw some tried and true recovery techniques at my shin splint problem: ice, stretching, massage, shin muscle exercises, and Motrin. While waiting for my knees and shins to recover, I still went to the gym to lift weights and run on the elliptical machine. I didn't want to have to sit out for too long and lose any momentum (or endurance), so the elliptical machine's ultra-low impact motion is nothing short of a godsend.

In addition to the cure for shin splints, I started working on some preventative measures. Over the past week, I focused on improving my arch strength. At work, I loosened my shoes a little, and tried not to let their arch supports do the heavy lifting. At the gym I wore the Vibrams, and when I got home, I walked around the house barefoot.

It sounds kind of ridiculous, but after focusing on letting my own feet support my arches for a week, they already feel stronger. Maybe that's just me being optimistic, but there are muscles in my feet that I wouldn't have known about, if it weren't for the fact that they are now sore.

By this morning, I was completely shin pain free, so I went for another run. I focused on keeping my arches from flattening, and on trying to eliminate a lot of up and down movement. My theory was that by preventing the shin muscle from stretching too much I would also prevent the shin pain. So far, I'm happy to say that it was a success. I ran 0.6 miles today before I started feeling my foot muscles lose the strength to maintain their arch shape. I stopped to prevent injury. I might not be going very far yet, but that extra tenth of a mile is still progress.

The Future

My experience over the past 2 weeks has taught me that it's going to take a long time to get where I want to be. The difference between previous attempts and this one is that I'm now armed with the knowledge to get better, and the motivation to get stronger and go further. The difference is that I used to want to become a runner, and now I am one.

My eventual goal is to just be able to run pain-free until I'm tired. To get out of the gym and into the real world. Expect plenty of (much shorter) progress updates along the way.

Blog<Running> Part 1

I recently became really passionate about running.

By "recently," I mean as of 2 weeks ago, and by "really passionate about running," I mean that my frothing desire to run is starting to spill over into the rest of my life. Which just so happens to include this blog. I feel like that's as good a reason as any to put it down in ink (pixels?) for consumption by anonymous internet people.

The Beginning

My experience with exercise started when I was 3 years old. My mom took me to a pool, got me a kickboard, and I was set. At age 6, I joined a summer league swim team and until my freshman year in college, I basically swam nonstop (with the exception of that time that I lived in a small town in Kansas that didn't have a swim team). Swimming is great exercise and as a result, I stayed lean and healthy while I kept at it.

As I entered high school, my training intensified and I started to experience what it felt like to push my body as far as it would go. I loved barely being able to pull myself out of the pool because I had spent all my energy in a race. I loved the accomplishment of making it through "hell week", 2 practices totaling 5 hours and 10,000 yards every day for a week (almost a quarter marathon every day for 6 days in a row... swimming.)

Swimming instilled that sense of accomplishment, satisfaction, and wellbeing that comes after doing something really hard. And don't forget the endorphins that rush through you when you've just kicked your ass for 2 hours. It's easy look back on those days with nostalgia.

The Middle

When I went off to college, I joined a club swim team with the hopes of one day walking on to the school's team. Shortly thereafter, I was overwhelmed by school work and my newfound personal freedom. I stopped swimming and started partying. My dream of joining the swim team suddenly didn't seem as important. As I started feeling the pressure of my future bearing down on me, I replaced most of the partying with studying. I still swam on my own every now and then, but it was nothing close to the intensity or duration that I was doing in high school. I just didn't have time for it anymore.

When I graduated and got a job, I went through a similar phase. I gained more free time (no homework), but spent most of it playing video games or watching TV. Having a job also increased my income. With the price of restaurant food no longer an issue, I started eating out all the time. Every day for lunch, I ate some ridiculous-sized portion of fast food. I started swimming again off and on, but it was only enough to slow my weight gain to about a pound a month. Finally, I was transfered to Dallas, and after a brief attempt to lose weight, I stopped working out all together.

The Recent Past

One day at the end of last year, I got out of the shower and looked in the mirror. When I saw the chubby naked body staring back at me, it triggered something in my brain. I hated what I saw. I wasn't the skinny, lean kid I remembered from just a few years ago. I had become chubby, flabby, weak, and old.

I needed to make a change in my life. I got on the scale that I had been avoiding for months and it read 266 lbs. How the hell did I weigh that much? My senior year in high school I weighed 185, when I graduated college I weighed 220, and on my wedding day, I weighed 230. Oh. I suppose that could be considered a pattern. I am pretty tall at 6'4", so it took a long time for that weight to spread over my frame, to the point where I wasn't noticing how out of shape I had become. But give it a couple months, a couple years, and suddenly I hardly recognized myself.

Without hesitation, I started going to the gym. It's literally inside the building where I work. In hindsight, if it weren't for this convenience I probably wouldn't have made it very far. I started working out every day. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I used the elliptical machine for about 30 minutes (plus 10 minutes for warmup and cooldown). On Tuesday and Thursday, I did resistance training, starting off with high reps of low resistance free weights. On Saturday, I went back to the elliptical machine for a slightly slower pace, but bumped the time up to 40-50 minutes.

I also started watching what I ate. I went from eating 4000 calories on some days to eating between 1800 and 2400. I stopped drinking Mountain Dew for breakfast, and replaced it with a granola bar. In fact, I cut out sodas almost entirely (from 2-4 a day to 1-2 a week), and replaced them with plain old water. For lunch, I substituted the fast food with a can of Campbell's soup and a sandwich, and maybe a bag of baked chips. For dinner, I started eating pasta, or chicken, or maybe a can of chili, or some tuna helper, or occasionally a healthy-ish frozen dinner (one of the ones that comes in a bag you heat up in a skillet).

After 2 weeks, I had lost 5 lbs.

After a month, I had lost 10 lbs and felt way stronger. I was no longer winded from walking up the stairs. I could easily carry that 40 lb container of kitty litter, or that 50 lb bag of dog food.

Since then, the ride has occasionally been bumpy. About once a week, I cheat and eat out, and there have been a couple of weeks where I hardly worked out at all, but I don't lose motivation because I continue to see results. I am still on track to meet my goal of losing 60 lbs by October (at this rate, I'll finish 2 months ahead of schedule). I keep getting stronger, I keep building my endurance, my pants and shirts keep getting looser, I sleep better, my acid reflux is gone, and I could honestly list dozens of other ways that this decision has improved my life.

The Present

This morning, I weighed in at 219 lbs. Yesterday, I was able to keep my heart rate between 170 and 195 bpm for about 55 minutes on the elliptical machine (1200 calories burned). Two Saturdays ago, I was able to run on the elliptical machine at a slightly slower pace for 90 minutes (1600 calories). The feeling is the same as when I was swimming in high school: the muscle soreness, the physical exhaustion, the accomplishment of doing something hard, and the endorphins that make it all feel really good.

So what the hell does all of that have to do with my sudden interest in running?

Find out in part 2.