I have not run with my VFFs in really cold weather. The coldest I think was around -7 C. Today my toes did not get cold, but I did feel a good deal of frost burning in all my other outdoor VFF runs, probably because it was colder. I kept having to flex my toes and worry about frostbite until around the 3 km mark when my toes warmed up to a normal comfortable temperature. My wife came up with a theory for that and I think it is correct. She thinks my body shuts off blood flow to my toes and fingers until my core body temperature is high enough to begin diverting heat to the extremities.

I am not really paying a lot of attention to my foot strike like I did in the beginning. When I started I made sure to land on the forefoot and this caused me some problems and a lot of soreness. Now, I am pretty sure I mostly land on the mid-foot, my second most frequent landing is on the forefoot, and very rarely I still heel strike depending on the terrain and whether I am going uphill or downhill. On the road the foot strike is fairly clear-cut and well defined, but on the trails it is almost always a combination of all three at the same time and never the same foot strike twice in a row. If you can imagine that, great, if you cannot then all I can say is the terrain varies greatly on the size scale of your foot so there is no way you can predict how your foot is going to respond to the ground. It just does so in a dynamic way and your foot really instantly senses the tiniest micro-variations under it and responds accordingly even before you have transferred your full weight onto it.

I find myself running more and more with my knees bent slightly especially on the downhill. This essentially means I have a shorter stride and keep my center of gravity under me at all times.

One other thing I would like to comment on is muscle recruitment versus training and injuries. There comes a time when you push it too far and injure yourself. But as you become more aware of how your body reacts to training you begin to know when to back off and when to call the bluff and ignore the complaints (of your muscles, that is). Today I actually imagined I felt I had exceeded the limits of certain muscles but rather than getting injured, I felt other smaller muscles coming into play to support the big ones. I think this is the first time I imagine I could actually witness new muscle recruitment taking place. Which is pretty cool. But it could be pure imagination. Which is OK. Because I never imagined I would ever be a runner in the first place. When I began I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going or why.

So there you have it. If I imagine something, then the rest of me will follow up on that and I will begin to make conscious and unconscious choices leading to that goal.

There is no other way.

My muscles were too stiff on the initial climb out of the valley and I wish I had rolled before starting out. I had to walk most of that hill. I was worried too that my toes would freeze, especially the middle toe on each foot since I was feeling a little frostbite burn on those. I just kept running and flexing my toes to make sure I could still feel them. It wasn’t until I passed the 3 kilometer mark that my worries about toe frostbite disappeared as they were now nice and toasty warm. I will have to think about better ways to keep my toes warm.

That’s about it. Expect perhaps to say that as long as I can tolerate the cold toes somehow, I can’t imagine myself ever wearing running shoes again for a run. But it is too early to know that for sure. I do not know if there will be a problem if I become really used to the VFFs then suddenly switch back to shoes for a race.

Sometimes, I hate having to figure this stuff out.