Run 68, 2011 …my toes are full, and a suggested definition for minamilist running.

I ran 4.5 kilometers today on my home trails with my VFFs and my toes got full. The unusually heavy and persistent rains we have been getting are causing the vegetation to grow quickly so even though I mow and maintain the trails regularly the vegetation still was enough to stuff my toes full. It is really funny looking to have flowers and grass standing straight up in some kind of sicko toe bouquet! And I have to say, very wet and annoying. I am thinking of adding a wooden chopstick or something to my running tool kit to clean them out every now and then.

So my trails here at home present a wide variety of running surfaces even though the entire loop is only 1.5 kilometers. I have soft sand, freshly tilled hills of rich loam (from the activity of pocket gophers and other diggers) hard baked crusty dirt (or it would be if it ever stopped raining), grass, weeds, roots poking up through the ground and so on. The only thing I do not have is hard rocks or gravel although there is a section of trail carpeted with pine cones which are quite interesting to run on since they are hard and also they roll and break underfoot.

And I have some minor hills. I can and will extend the trail system to be much longer but they need a lot of maintenance.

So today was my second run in my VFFs outdoors under real trail conditions. I cannot emphasize too much how absolutely different it feels to run on an indoor cushy track versus running outdoors. The indoor track (and I presume any road surface one usually runs on), is completely safe and you do not have to worry about your feet at all. You just sort of lock everything in its place and start cruising down the road or track. However, if you run on real trails, you begin to notice that you feel everything, as I have said before. I do not run as quickly as I would on a track. On a track or road there is no problem with your ankles or joints because they operate exactly the same with every stride and they operate on the same plane with every stride. On the trail, this never happens. Every footstep is different and your ankles twist and turn every which way to compensate for the uneven surface. Surfaces which seem hard at first suddenly yield unpredictably to your weight and you instantly compensate by actively redistributing your weight in real time to avoid injury or to avoid falling. Running on the trails with minimalist shoes is kind of like snowflakes: No two steps are alike. When the surface of the ground is hidden by vegetation, even though closely mowed down, you cannot see some holes which do cause problems. Any hole or depression large enough (say 3 inches or more in diameter) is a problem when it is hidden by vegetation, and on my property there are thousands of holes from thousands of hole making creatures.

The effect of this is that you run very cautiously, meaning you cannot run as quickly as on a safe uniform road or track. Of course, if you run the trail often enough, you will know when you can speed up and run with abandon and when not to. Another effect which I feel is astonishingly good and important is that you have to focus closely on every square inch of the surface you are running on and react instantly to any odd thing you may feel with your sensitive feet. This means you are using foot muscles and flexibilities that you have not used for a long time. It also means your brain is working very hard trying to sort out all those new challenges and inputs and is burning new neural pathways.

So yes, I think minimalist running is very interesting and worthwhile. I have not tried other types of shoes like the Nike Free for instance so I cannot comment on how they feel. Nevertheless I think the term “minamilist running” should be defined so that it is independent of any specific type of protective foot covering, whether that protection is a nothing at all except really tough calluses on your feet, socks, Vibram FiveFingers, or any other kind of protection. So my suggested definition is any kind of running where you have no stability structures, cushioning, or support, and your feet have every degree of freedom in movement that being actually barefoot can provide, at least for running purposes. That would be three degrees of freedom. As to cushioning, that would be anything obviously designed to absorb impact such as gel inserts as opposed to the hard pad of the sole designed to protect from cuts and abrasion.

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Yet another running injury…

But wait! It is not very often that you go running and end up with an injury to your hand. I knew the Devon trail would be a mudhole today and so I took my Nordic poles along. I was not even one kilometer into the run when the treacherous mud got me while I was standing still trying to adjust the straps on my Nordic poles, without which you just cannot do the slimy hills. Actually the sequence of events is a bit fuzzy but I broke my fall with my right hand. Those finger gloves I wear for protection from just such events? They were cut clean like a knife. I would hate to know what my hand would look like if I did not have those gloves but the cut was very deep and about two inches long. The cut was in the fleshy part of my right palm. I do not know what I landed on but I was bleeding pretty heavily so I wrapped my trusty handkerchief around my hand and tied a knot with my teeth and motored on. The further I ran, or more accurately slid along the mud, the more blood I was losing. I was weighing my options because I knew I would have to go to the hospital to get it treated. And I had to be somewhere else today too, so I knew I would have to abort my run due to the probably long wait time in emergency. I always take a pair of clean shoes in a plastic bag so I changed out of my muddy trail shoes before I went to the hospital. Fortunately I had left a pair of clean pants in the car too. The pants I was wearing were totally soaked through and covered in a thick greasy layer of mud where I landed hard on the wet clay.

So I cut my run short after 3 or so kilometers and drove myself to the hospital. The doctor poked my hand (many times in different places) with a local anesthetic which hurt like hell because of the sensitive nerves, cleaned the wound, then gave me about a dozen stitches, slavered it with antibiotic paste and told me to keep it bandaged for 24 hours. There was blood everywhere. Then I got a tetanus shot and a prescription for an antibiotic.

Sometimes I feel people think I am a little weird for wearing those fingerless gloves, but they have saved me countless times from many minor abrasions and now it looks like they saved me from a worse injury. I also feel people think I am strange for wearing sunglasses when it is not sunny out, but those are also safety glasses and they have kept crap out of my eyes on the trail too. Too bad the gloves were cut clean through. Now I need a new pair.

So now I am pretty angry because I did not get my run in, and it looks like the rain is not going to let up in time for Sunday’s long run on that same trail. And now I am just going to throw a temper tantrum and be grumpy all week. I will probably never know what I landed on. Was it a piece of glass? Metal? A hard sharp rock? That is going to bug me for a long time.

On the bright side, I do not run on my hands so I do not have to stop running.

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July 2011 Update on Barefoot Training

To refresh your memories I began barefoot training in the beginning of February. A few weeks before that I began trying a forefoot strike and naturally progressed to running on the indoor track with just socks because the heels on my shoes just made it too hard to do a forefoot strike. Well today, I ran 3 kilometers on the home trail outdoors in my VFF’s for the first time ever. I have some pretty interesting trails with a few minor hills on my property which is just ideal for beginning to run with my Vibrams.

I have to say that there is just no other way to run except barefoot. Of course that is just an exaggeration designed to emphasize that I really like it. Having run only on a smooth indoor track with zero debris and zero obstacles, I have to say that I learned a few new things today. Things which I have never read nor heard anyone else comment on.

You feel absolutely everything with your feet. Every pebble, every stick, every blade of grass even the tiniest hollow or bump is felt by your feet. Sticks, blades of vegetation wedge themselves between your toes. But beyond that I noticed an interesting effect. Although you feel the debris under your feet, it is not painful like it would be with truly bare feet. The soles of the Vibrams do protect you. However, I found that when I landed on a really hard knobby pebble or stick with my forefoot I noticed that I instantaneously transferred my weight to my heel on the fly in real time as it were. And if I felt something really hard and pokey with my heel as I rolled it down, I again immediately transferred enough weight to my forefoot so that in any case I did not bruise or otherwise hurt myself. I instantly felt holes hidden in the grass in the ground (from burrowing animals for example) and was able to take the weight off of that leg to prevent injury or a turned ankle.

I think it is incredible how I did that automatically without even thinking about it. I specified that I automatically took weight off my forefoot or heel as I began to feel some unyielding object under them but in fact any part of my foot that touched a pokey something would automatically then transfer the weight away from that area. I think that is an incredible display of neurological training of the very sensitive feet. Your feet are an amazing piece of technology. I’ll bet NASA would pay billions for that kind of response to terrain. The upshot of this is that my feet are re-awakening old neurological pathways and burning new ones. Muscles are being reactivated, muscles that for years were suppressed by being entombed in artificial structures designed to limit movement.

So having actually run in truly bare feet, and then run in Vibram Five Fingers, I have to say that there is little difference overall. The only difference is that you do not end up with cut up butchered feet thanks to the minimal padding, only enough to serve as a base for the traction tread on my particular model (KSO Treks). And also your toes are not as flexible due to the toe coverings, but this is a minor detail; they are still independent.

So in conclusion I do not regret taking it very slow and easy with respect to increasing my distances. I find that I run with a higher cadence and shorter stride but overall I am much faster than with shoes. But it does not feel like I am going faster. I think that is just because I am not used to it yet.

Barefoot running. There is nothing like it.

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Subjective observations on muscle training and how they relate to injuries…

What happens when you begin to change your training either by increasing the training or by undertaking training for a new activity? I have made some unscientific subjective observations which I would like to share with you. I think it may help to explain why some of us get injured, and why it takes so long to create a stable fitness base, or a stable fitness foundation from which you can progress. I have made these subjective observations because of my own training. I have been trying to effect a transition from the normal shoe where I run with a heel or at best mid-foot strike to a minimalist shoe (Vibram Five Fingers) forefoot strike.

I have observed that when I run with a forefoot strike, different muscles are involved than when I run with normal shoes using a heel or mid-foot strike. I think it is very difficult to use a forefoot strike with normal shoes since the heel is too high. If you try, you will break down physically. But as I have said, no scientific measurements were taken and these are just subjective observations which I have made.

So here is what I think happens: You first begin to train in your new training system and the weakest muscles which are directly involved in the movements become fatigued and if taken to extreme levels they break down and get injured. Normally we stop before that happens and so we merely end up with sore muscles. Normally, the training continues until you are no longer challenged and the next step is to increase the intensity until you are used to that, then you repeat the process until you achieve your goal. You would think that the muscles which you have hardened would then show the same reaction by becoming sore again from the increased intensity and usually that is what happens, but sometimes something else happens.

Your muscles do not work in isolation. In fact it is so difficult to isolate a muscle that special techniques and machines are invented to do that as weight lifters can all tell you. So what happens is that the hardened muscle is not at all inconvenienced by your additional effort in training. What is inconvenienced is that small peripheral muscle which suddenly gives way because now that is the weakest link for that amount of effort. So one possible training effect is that there is a cascading chain of muscles associated with your activity that need to be hardened each in turn. In other words, the entire chain of interdependent muscles for a given activity needs to be brought up to speed, as it were. That small muscle will not even be activated, probably, until you exceed a certain training threshold, so do not be surprised to find that after many weeks of training and feeling strong, suddenly you develop a new muscle problem, leaving you confused and wondering what went wrong. In fact, nothing went wrong, you just activated a new muscle in that chain, a muscle which is not used to that level of activity. When I say “activated” I do not mean it has never done anything until then – I mean to say that its capacity for work has been exceeded.

One example in my own barefoot training is that initially my lower calf muscles (probably the Soleus) became very sore. Over time with proper training they were fine. When the training is increased, one of two things can happen: Either the Soleus muscles get sore again or the next weakest link in the chain gets sore. I suppose both can happen at the same time. So the other day I ran 3.5 km which was an increase of 500 meters from last time. I felt great with no inkling of any problem whatsoever. However when I resumed the run after stopping to change back into normal shoes as I usually do, after only 500 more meters I had to stop because of a problem in my right calf muscle, above the Soleus. I assume that was the next weakest link in the chain.

In hindsight, over the years I can see where things like that have always been happening. I would get used to something, only to have a different problem arise. My subjective conclusion is that the weakest link in your chain of muscles for any activity will always break down or at least need to be brought up to snuff before your body automatically progresses to the next weakest link. For any specific activity, I postulate that only when every muscle in the chain of muscles supporting that activity is strengthened properly can you then say that you have a solid foundation for further increases in training. I think it is important to distinguish the difference between a muscle which is directly involved in an activity (such as the calf muscle in running), and a muscle whose only contribution is to tense up in order to either support or “pad” the active main muscle and possibly also help to absorb the impact shock. Those muscles are important and not necessarily part of the muscle chain involved in movement. They are peripheral and their only function is to support and absorb shock. Nevertheless, they can also begin to either fail or become really sore, and if they do fail your activity will be compromised significantly even though they do not work directly.

Well, I hope this gives you all food for thought and maybe this will help beginning runners understand what is going on so that they do not get too discouraged when they run into problems.

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More pictures from the 5Peaks trail race in Sunridge…

As any fool can plainly see, John is clearly winning.

Read more: At Tribal Running

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Sunridge 5Peaks Trail Race

See the guest post at this link regarding this race HERE

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More Opinion on the Crystal Child Phenomena…and a shameless Dalai Lama plug.

On the internet today, there are many self proclaimed light workers, indigo children, rainbow children, or any of a number of different terms they use to describe themselves. These people are allegedly enlightened, or at least on the path of enlightenment, and way more enlightened than normal people. They have been born into this world in order to raise the frequency of the Earth and help mankind to become more enlightened and therefore facilitate an ascension process wherein we pass into a different more enlightened and spiritual dimension or era. I will refer to them as children in the above context for this post even though many of them are now adults. Hopefully when I use the the term “children” you will understand I mean the crystal children or I mean real children depending on the context. The term “children” also has a learning connotation of being young, innocent, and eager to learn new things even if you are an adult.

It is not my intention to define nor explain these terms. I will however summarize the more salient points in order to make my point, which is this: Not many of these children have any critical thinking skills. All of them have taken the easy way out and merely believed whatever appeals to them on an emotional level. And with hardly any work at all, they can miraculously go instantly from ignorant, uneducated people with very little critical thinking skills, to amazing prophets of the future to whose words you must cling to with rapt and ecstatic attention. Some of them make a bit of easy money on this too, but most are just happy to state their cause and bask in the glory that is You Tube. If you are interested, you may Google them and decide for yourself. My own opinion of this is that a lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon and proclaiming themselves as modern day crystal children who are somehow evolved or evolving into something better. In other words, the internet, and more specifically venues such as You Tube, are feeding on themselves, and it seems like every person who has ever imagined being misunderstood or unique or different has suddenly decided that they are one of the chosen, if I can put it that way. They are special crystal children and therefore what they have to say is worth your time to listen.

In general, many claim to be psychic, and they can channel superior entities from another dimension, or perhaps these channeled entities are in this dimension but we just cannot see them because they vibrate too quickly for us. There are some cute metaphors to illustrate why we cannot see them such as how you can see the blades of a fan and you cannot see what is behind the blades, but when the fan is spinning quickly, you cannot see the blades but you can see what is behind them. Some of these self proclaimed crystal children even believe they are Gods, or at least Gods in training and they believe that their thoughts create their reality in the sense that their thoughts and beliefs can alter the natural world to reflect their every desire, even if that desire is one which manipulates the material world. For example, they can control the weather and they can through the power of their own thoughts, cause events and things to happen even if it involves bending other people to their wills. They cannot adequately explain how they deal with their next door neighbor who is also a God who does not want what you want. Perhaps they just duke it out mentally. In this sense their successes stem from their own God-like powers of belief, and their failures stem from their lack of faith and personal power.

In general all of them seem to be good people, teaching, endorsing, and pushing peace and love as the key to our evolution. Almost without exception they claim that they were extraterrestrial souls with previous lives who volunteered to come to Earth to uplift mankind. This was deemed necessary by groups or federations of extraterrestrial entities who are much more spiritually evolved than we are and who want to help mankind achieve enlightenment, because they love mankind. Although in general they have forgotten their previous lives, they have the potential to remember and they are here as sort of spiritual antennae – in effect they are merely receivers that act like some sort of resonance feedback loop effecting the ascension process by raising the average frequency of the planet so that benevolent higher frequencies can prevail thus assuring the shift in frequencies ostensibly peaking in 2012.

Peace and love is good, I will give you that, however I postulate that if there really is a group of more evolved alien peoples who are facilitating our ascension via this crystal child process, then I can probably safely speculate that opposition groups also exist and they also are birthing children into this world to achieve the opposite goal: That of keeping mankind ignorant and therefore susceptible to covert control and domination methods. Both groups have been at it and watching us for eons of time. Sounds like quite a war brewing here, does it not? If this is true, that there are benevolent beings that love us and want to guide us to spiritual ascension, then I find it extremely difficult to believe their claim that they are our friends and want to help us for altruistic reasons. And so should anyone else who is aware of all the assistance we got from these so called enlightened and benevolent extraterrestrial beings during World War II and the Nazi death camps, or during Pol Pot’s genocide, or during the Rwandan wars, or the current South American and Mexican drug cartel atrocities, or any one of countless acts of barbarity that we good people could have used a little help on. But I digress.

Whatever may be the truth, none of these spiritual channelers, psychic advisers, or crystal children, have presented nor are capable of presenting any reasonable objective evidence whatsoever. I am not saying that this is complete bullshit. I do not know if there is any truth to what they say or not. I do know that something strange is going on and that science (real science based on reproducible evidence and observation) is uncovering some really strange things about the nature of the universe and quantum theory (see my post on “The physics of David Wilcock et. al.” – I could add “quantum entanglement to this list of strange stuff but maybe you could save me a whole lot of time by looking that up yourself).

Nevertheless, although modern physics is discovering that we know less than we thought, these spiritual people know even less than that. All we have is their word on what is happening in their heads, and not much else. And I am certain you will find that the evolution of the internet probably closely matches the evolution of these people and that what they say becomes more and more similar because more and more of them are parroting what they see on the internet, especially from You Tube. It would not be an easy task to conclude that the reason for the increase in anything (such as the prevalence of crystal children) is because of more births or because more people are reading about them on the internet which coincidentally has grown at a very similar rate. Per capita comparisons are also not that easy, since the dynamics also change with sample size.

When challenged, many of these children rely on feelings and faith to defend their views and statements, but some of them fanatically oppose any criticism and resort to immature (ie:childish) methods of retaliation. By that I mean that the coping skills and response mechanism are very primitive, such as a child would use. And how do children cope with the world? They respond emotionally, and with manipulation. None of them can present any evidence for any of the more spiritual far out stuff such as telepathy, channeling external invisible entities, and so on. All of them feel special and I suspect they think they are better than the rest of us, even though they make statements to the contrary. I think that is only human of them and all of us are bound to feel special in any endeavor we are good at whether it is something mundane like being a good hockey player to something really special like claiming you are channeling the White Winged Collective Consciousness of Nine, or the Galactic Federation of Light, or Ashtar Command, or a Pleiadian entity or group of entities.

The bottom line here is that it does not matter. Who cares if Pleiadian entities really are speaking with humans telepathically across God knows how many light years, or just invisibly standing beside you and whispering sweet nothings in your ear? I mean we would care if we could prove it. But we cannot. And if it were true that mysterious entities really are speaking telepathically and guiding these children? How do they know that they are not merely being played for a fool and being deceived by entities who are hiding their real agenda? Again, who cares? I am sure that the children would care. And so would we if we could know for sure. But we do not know. So what can we do, those of us seeking truth and finding chaos and confusion? The answer could not be simpler. Just do what really matters.

So what does matter? What matters is peace, love, compassion, tolerance, accommodation, sacrifice, and understanding of not only ourselves, but of the natural world and other beings, both animal and vegetable. Do unto others what pleases you. What does that mean? Well, given that you are not totally insane or mentally ill, that generally means you would not like it if your stuff was stolen, misused, or or if your cat was butchered by your neighbor just for laughs, and you would not like it if someone were to punch the crap out of you, or call you fatso, or murder you. This is pretty basic morality and I should not have to explain it. Practice our shared morality. I am not talking about whether women should be allowed to drive as an example of a moral issue (as is the current law in Saudi Arabia). I am talking about the fundamentals: Food, clothing, shelter, the right of self-determination and freedom. Do not murder or steal, that sort of thing. Pretty basic stuff and free of all religious dogma. Consider the words of people like the Dalai Lama. Read his book, “How to Be Compassionate: A Handbook for Creating Inner Peace and a Happier World”. Because when you have inner peace, you will reflect that in the outer world.

Again, so what if the world is ending in 2012 or if it is instead changing into a blissful paradise? So why run around in a panic wondering whether you should listen to the Pleiadians, or to the Reptilians, or to Ashtar Command? It does not matter as long as you practice compassion and do what is morally right. If you do this, you will not be able to be deceived because you will always be doing right and you will know that if these people tell you things contrary to the principal of love and compassion, you will not be deceived by these “demons disguised as angels of light” to paraphrase an idea from the Bible. Whatever happens is beyond your control anyway, so why not just do what is right all the time? You can view these channelers to you heart’s content on You Tube, with bemused interest, but there is no need to get all worked up about what to do since you already know what to do. Whatever the outcome, you will definitely be looking back and you will either say I did the best I could and tried to be loving and compassionate – and I can prove it by quantitatively demonstrating progress in this area of my life even though I have not been perfect nor am I now perfect – , or I just ran around screaming, and panicking, and wishing I were there already but I’m not there and how do I get there and and – and I got nowhere. Which path would you prefer?

So if I were to ask what is the most important concept to take away from this post, I would have to say that you can ignore the chaos and confusion (because it is irrelevant) if you find inner peace. You find inner peace by practicing love and compassion, firstly for yourself, secondly for others. For yourself because if you cannot love yourself, you cannot love the world. For others because that is what flows naturally from loving yourself. Because if you find inner peace, you will help to change the world. Peace, and Namaste.

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