Life Back on the Road

It's taken me a bit to get to this. After two back to back weeks on the road (with a 36 hour home layover), I am finally back to my normal routine back here in good old Brooklyn. Some fun stuff to report from travel, so here it goes.

I left you promising I'd give you an update on my first real running barefoot attempt, so let's start there. My first week on the road was in Denver. I landed very late Sunday night and had to be up and running on Monday morning, so by the time Monday night rolled around, I crashed. I planned for my barefoot run to go down Tuesday morning. I decided to do my run on the treadmill because it would afford me a far more pliable surface than the road would. I also knew I had to keep the miles slow and short because this would be a very different experience than my body was used to. So off I went at 5am Tuesday morning.

Let me first start with the observation that altitude really does have on athleticism. Having been to Denver before, but never as an athlete, I felt a little less prepared for this-- I mean, you hear it, but its another thing to experience it. It didn't take me long to feel that impact rather acutely as my pace was naturally slowed by a sense that I couldn't get nearly enough air in me. The run itself felt a little strange at first. I'm getting more used to a ball-of-foot strike using my newtons, but what I hadn't expected is how jarring that impact can feel with nothing at all there. It took me a few steps before I noticed I was totally changing up my land to something a lot smoother and lighter. I'm not sure the entire explanation for how that happened because it wasn't conscious, but I was definitely aware that almost right away my body was conditioned to do something, it did it, it hurt, it modified. Much unlike being in my newtons, I didn't have to think about foot placement-- my body just sort of did it because of comfort. I don't think I appreciated how far off of normal biomechanics shoes really make things until that moment. It was eye opening.

I ran about 2 miles. Slowly. I was thinking I wanted to do more because it was feeling good except that there was a small spot on the inside of my right arch just behind the ball of my foot that could feel a rub from the seam of the vibram itself. I didn't want to rub that spot raw and realized I would need to get my feet used to a lot of time in the shoes first, but ultimately thats what made me stop. At no point in my run did my knees hurt. At no point did I knick the inside of my ankle bone with my opposite foot as I often do in shoes. It felt good and easy.

While in Denver I decided to check out my local Crossfit affiliate-- I am learning that this is critical to my keeping my sense of sanity on the road. So I wound up at Front Range Crossfit, the site of the Rocky Mountain Qualifiers for the Crossfit games. It was great to do a workout with a group of people that really brought their game-- and despite the incredible challenge the altitude was giving me, I hit a new PR in a lift that has stymied me for a while. So after 2 days of working with the crew there, I was beyond thrilled.

From there I headed home for a mere 36 hours which was mostly laundry, restocking cat food and some quiet time before I was on a train to Virginia (this had all unfolded on Monday in Denver). I figured I'd try out my luck there too and wound up at another Crossfit affiliate-- Crossfit Fairfax where the workout was equally challenging, but I loved it. This affiliate will likely be a frequent stop for me going forward if I spend time in Virginia.

My week at home has been good-- I am finally hitting my groove again and have really enjoyed coming back to my own box and working out again with the crew. It's nice to have everyone tell me how much I have been missed-- my affiliate really does feel like a bit of family.

And on that note, I am going to stop with a notation that I will need to explain in more detail, but...

This weekend we have a big event at the box. Jacinto turns 70. Jacinto is one of the Crossfit trainers and a bit of a legend, truth be told. We call him the Warrior and there are tee-shirts many of us sport with his picture on the front. Here is a picture I took of him at the recent Northeast Qualifier Games where Jacinto went toe to toe with all the far younger male competitors. He is our hero, to say the least.


In honor of Jacinto's 70th birthday, we do the workout of Jacinto's choice, and this annual event has become known as Jacintostorm. So tomorrow, I will be executing the following workout:

Run 620 meters
70 Squats
70 Push-ups
70 Pull-ups or Jumping Pull-Ups
70 Wall Ball Shots with a weighted medicine ball
70 Kettlebell Swings
70 Deadlifts 65lbs
Run 620 meters

Yeah, looks painful huh? So tomorrow we get our asses kicked for and with Jacinto, who proves to us year after year that you are never too old to throw down.

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Barefoot Running

I gave this topic some brief mention back on the old blog, but after some time, I need to come back to it, cause this week it's gonna be big... I'm learning to run barefoot.

Yep. You heard me. And here's how I am gonna do it.


That, my friends, is my leg and foot (you can tell by the pasty, glow-in-the-dark pallor) ... sporting my new pair of (drumroll, please...) Vibram Five Fingers.

So these are my new shoes. Are they dorky? You better believe it. Will I look silly wearing them? Absa-smurfly. Will they allow me to run injury free while improving the biomechanics of my run? I believe they will. So I'm willing to look the part of the tool if it gets me where I need to be.

Back in October I tried a pair of these bad boys on, only to walk away in disappointment because the muscles in my feet did not have the flexibility and the give to articulate my toes enough to separate them into the toes of these shoes. I set out on a mission at that point to be able to strengthen my feet to help achieve that goal. Last week, I tried on a pair again and my work has paid off.

Since October I have been working on separating my toes as much as I could, using toe spreaders and toe spreading sandals. I also bought pairs of wicking socks that kept my toes separated so that I could keep wearing my sandals in the house when it was cold.

For 9 months I just sort of tried this out. What I noticed in the meantime was that my balance improved. My feet widened-- I always joked about my "ski feet," but the truth is that I struggled to find shoes in a AA width because they were so narrow. My overall flexibility improved and in small increments, the muscles that articulate my toes began to work. As of last week, my feet finally, comfortably, went into the Vibrams so I could walk around.

It's hard to describe how these things feel. I wore them for a workout at Crossfit last week-- we were doing powercleans and box jumps, so there was a fair amount of jumping involved. First thing I noticed was the extent to which my feet were it-- there isn't really a sole on these things so much as a thin layer of countoured rubber. The arch of the foot is left to do what it wants, and every place your foot wants to touch the floor, it will. My work over these past few months in yoga has been to pull up my arches and begin to stand on the outer parts of my feet while trying to engage that arch up off the floor. This will become more important as the process to running barefoot begins to take off. When jumping, the second thing I noticed is the inclination to hit on my heal and then let the rest of my feet sort of find their way to the ground. Doing this without the luxury of padding hurt. I had to begin to think about landing from a jump onto as much of my feet as I could... toes, ball, outside edge and heel, to disperse the jolt. Lastly, I needed to land lighter and more controlled. My first few powercleans were ugly and wobbly but eventually it felt good. My later box jumps felt the same way and in time I actually felt more stable doing this.

I decided as well that day to walk home in my shoes. Imagine walking for half an hour, on concrete and asphalt, totally barefoot. I've spent 36 years walking in shoes-- its rare for us all to walk around the world without them, so my first attempt at this was very strange. I could literally feel everything... every crack, every textured surface, every pebble. I noticed the extent to which my heel strike was very pronounced and hard. My inclination was to always keep my ankle at this 90 degree angle and just sort of plant my foot and roll over it and back up never allowing my ankle to release that angle. Remember back when I got my bike fitting and the fitter noted the degree to which my ankle was not flexing in either direction (the plantar flexion vs. dorsiflexion angles)-- it became pretty apparent where that behavior gets solidified-- basic walking in shoes. It felt so strange that within my first few paces, my heel strike had to adjust more forward to my midfoot and everything had to compensate. It's hard to describe this except to say that walking started taking place behind me instead of in front of me. Maybe if you have a long hallway or a yard or something you can experience this too-- when you walk in shoes, your land is forward of your hips. When you walk barefoot, your land is about equal with your hips. It's less about pulling up to where you foot landed and more about pushing back from where you currently are. It's a strange shift and hard to describe, but it became very apparent to me walking home that night.

The last several months I have been playing with a biomechanical style of running called POSE. In order to begin to adopt Pose, until I could run barefoot, I needed to cut back on my running and begin to train my body to run with a midfoot strike-- and one of the things that helped me to develop that while still providing me the cushioning of allowing my feet to strengthen, were some shoes called Newtons. Between the Newton-forced midfoot strike, and the migration towards Pose using some of the strengthening exercises they recommend, my body has finally reached a point of being ready to try barefoot running.

This week I am on the road in Denver, Colorado. I am looking forward to finding the local Crossfit affiliate and trying my first official short run in my vibrams-- in fact, I haven't packed any other shoes, so I'm backing myself into the proverbial corner of trying this out. What's the worst that can happen right?

Stay tuned for details-- this could get interesting.

I end you today on what I like to call Workout Porn (sorry Mom, but having tried Crossfit yourself you should appreciate this even more now)-- my all-time favorite Crossfit workout: The Bear. The picture of me in my profile is from doing this very workout.

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One More for Good Measure

I'm all about teaser introductions to the kinds of things I need to begin blogging about. So let's call some of this pre-requisite reading, shall we? It seems that some of the directions I have begun to poke my way into have started gaining a lot of traction in the media as well--

The biomechanics of running and correlations to injury is yet one more topic I need to discuss. In the meantime, again, because it's so relevant-- a news story from last week's Boston.com.

Lots and lots more on this topic forthcoming.

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Starting Over

Sometimes it just makes more sense to throw out and begin anew. Let's call this that effort. A clean slate. While finding the time to blog has been difficult at best lately, a large part of the challenge has been that the things I was thinking about and changing in my world just no longer fit the "back of the pack" mentality anymore, so it was hard to fit it in. It needed an overhaul. So here we are.

I have a feeling this will take me a while and the groove will be very different than NSBotP, but so be it. Here's my best attempt at 'splaining the start of a very different chapter in my life.

When last I left off blogging (there were several draft entries that never got published) I had started on something called Crossfit. If you followed the old blog you know it a little. What you may not know is that Crossfit was a part of a much larger mental shift I was making. I realized right around the marathon last year that I had achieved a level of fitness to make running a marathon achievable, but that fitness wasn't really meshing with the wellness and real definition of health I wanted. In essence, something was missing and I had a sense that achieving that goal should have felt more epiphanous than it did. I was fit but I wasn't healthy and for the first moment in time I realized how wildly different those two things are, despite our culture thinking of them as synonymous.

Thinking about that was like pulling at a thread and next thing you knew, I was throwing out a lot of my world and reinventing it. I started challenging my reasoning, my habits, my diet, my very biomechanics. It's been very eye opening to say the least. The more I've poked, the more I've realized that our culture as a whole treats wellness in this largely reductionist and self-defeating way. It's like we've all forgotten the principles of equilibrium and live in some collective haze-- myself included. So without meaning to, I started pulling on that thread and things just started to go from there.

So I think this blog is going to be quite a hodgepog of thoughts... likely very different than my last blog (hopefully shorter), but more about the insights of the unravel and the connections I am starting to put together in my own head. I also realized I should start tagging this because it was going to cover a lot of different topics, so I'm tagging this with just some of the topics I know are going to come up... cause its sort of where my brain has been since June(ish). Call it a preview of the brain dump that is likely to ensue.

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