This topic is dear to my heart because I used to absolutely loathe running. Sweet lord have mercy did I hate it. I vividly remember running the mile in 6th grade gym class. The track was your standard 1/4 mile dirt track and in the field, just inside the bend on the far side of the track there was a giant tree. This tree was home base for me and several other kids who would pause (or rather stop completely for 1-2 mins at a time) and catch our breaths out of sight from the gym teachers. Of course they knew what we were doing and they only let us think we were smooth, but that's beside the point.
I honestly tried my hardest to run. I was fat and I did want to lose weight, but I would get 3/4 of the way around one lap and my body would be in chaos. My breathing was erratic, my feet, ankles, knees, hips, and shoulders hurt. My diaphragm felt like it was bathing in liquid hot magma, and the girls were laughing at the chubby kid having a heart attack... so my introduction to running for health wasn't of the pleasant variety.
My mile was about 14 minutes.
This hate for jogging continued all the way up to adulthood. In the gym I'd use the elliptical rather than the treadmill, I would never jog or run for more than a mile on my own (with the exception of 9th grade gym, detailed below), though it wasn't as torturous as before, it still took a ton of effort and usually left me incapacitated for the next day or two. This was killer on my confidence because I thought I was just completely out of shape and that I would have to work even harder to become a not so decent runner.
When I discovered MovNat and Erwan LeCorre's praise of barefoot running, it prompted me to check out the book "Born to Run" by Christopher McDougall and that's where I really began to have my eyes opened. I read, studied technique, and eventually got up the courage to try it myself.
I would run from Sara's house to a gamefarm park (about 1 mile) and see how it worked out for me. Keep in mind the furthest I'd ever ran was 4 miles and that was in 9th grade gym class. We worked up to it for about 2 months and it still took me almost an hour to complete. On this cloudy day, on the first real run that I had undertaken in about a year, I set out to accomplish 1 mile and ended up running 4 with absolutely no effort. It was as easy as if I had been a natural runner my whole life. Granted, I blistered the shit out of the bottoms of my feet because I didn't heed the "ease into it one block at a time" guideline, but hey, it was thrilling. I can handle a little bit of foot pain.
Now I was extremely excited, but the skeptic in me was nagging at me for the entire duration of my foots healing process. I was asking myself "What if it's only because I'm a lot healthier now?" I mean me at 21 is not the same as me at 13, 15, or even 20... so what if? Well I let my feet heal and threw on some running shoes to test myself out shod. By 1 3/4 miles I was done. My shins felt like they had been hit with hammers, my heart was hammering in my ears, and my knees were beginning to hurt. This was 2 weeks after the 4 mile run.
I was sold.
But why is running barefoot/minimalist better? You have to check out the next post here. Or read Chris McDougals book, but this will be quicker. (Read his book anyway. It's great.)
-Rob
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