Shoe Return

So, after 8 days of running only BF or water socks, I ran in my Mizuno Wave Universe 3's today and it is fascinating what I'm learning through this experience. A few take-aways:

1. I ran with no pain in my Mizuno's today. 15 minutes at 6:45 pace and 15 minutes at 7:45 pace. My BF form and technique transferred to the shods almost perfectly. I did a warm up 1 mile BF and warm down .88 miles BF. A few times I noticed myself getting sloppy in my shods and immediately corrected it based on my BF running. I ran with a straighter back and shorter stride, yet still ran as fast as I did before returning to BF. I also exerted very little energy to run fast which is direct result of BF. So this tells me my form was off when I was running in shods without BF.

2. I'm done with interval training and tempos is the way to go. The more I think about intervals, they don't make sense when you think about the human body. When you run tempo, you can work to the desired pace over a longer period of time. Then, to get faster, simply add duration at the same speed, then slowly add speed. This is more in line with how the East Africans train.


3. It's possible to run in shods but I still need to find the right mix. In this case it was 8 days of BF to allow me 1 day in shods and the day in shods included BF for warm up and warm down. I do know that I will not run back to back days in shods. So tomorrow, I'll go back to water socks.

4. In addition to training wrong, I (and others) may be over-training. I spent all this time to get to a 6:00 - 6:30 pace but today, rarely running at that pace over the past 14 days, I got there pretty easily. This tells me you don't need to train exactly at race pace but just be in the neighborhood (:30 - :40 sec. off race pace for training). The adrenalin of racing will fill the gap so I just need to make sure I do enough tempo and distance training so I'm physically ready to do it. My point, is for me to run say a 10k at 6:30 pace, I probably only need to run that pace once every 10 days or so and probably only need to do it for 30 minutes.

The journey continues but I'm committed since I know I can't go 100% BF living where I do. But I'm encouraged as I think there is a middle ground here. My original guess was that I would end up about 50/50 shod vs. unshod (Tuck, I believe that was your guess also) and I now believe that's where I'll end up. The only question will be whether there's other footwear like the Evo or Kuusa that can replace my Mizuno's, otherwise I'll keep going with the Mizuno's.

HHH