The Barefoot Experiment

I haven’t even purchased anything from them yet, but I already want to tell you about the stellar customer service experience I had with Zappos.com!  Lots of people rave about them and their customer service, and I can see why. I was investigating a new trail shoe on their site, but the problem is that my size has changed quite a bit since I started barefoot and minimalist training. My shoe size has decreased by an entire size in most shoes!  Testament to the power of strengthening your... (more...)

My apologies to regular readers, but The Barefoot Experiment is going to be seeing an abundance of shoe-related posts for a little while. The shoes will always be minimalist running shoes (despite almost falling into a pair of Brooks Cascadia 5 this week – sweet shoe though!), but as I ramp up my mileage while coming back from injury, I’m experimenting with some shoe options to allow me to run while still taking it a bit easy on my tendon. I’ve worked so hard at recovering that... (more...)

It’s that time of year again.  Summer touring season.  While I maintain a busy schedule year round, the summer always hits particularly hard and leaves me with too many miles on my car (thank goodness for Volvo life expectancy!), too little sleep, and not nearly enough music on my iPod.  I’m trying to change all of that though. In an effort to put time and energy into other areas of my life, I’ve slowly been modifying my schedule (even eliminating some performance dates) to allow... (more...)

Like many runners, I’m a bit obsessive about data.  I love to collect it.  I love to analyze it.  I love to spend time visualizing with maps, graphs, charts and long lists of numbers.  After all of my data is imported from my Garmin 405 and I’ve reviewed the hard numbers from the day’s run, one of my favorite things to do is send the data on over to Google Earth and watch as that big blue ball in the sky rotates and zooms in, aerial spy-like, to view the satellite imagery of... (more...)

The American Hiking Society website. Creators of National Trails Day. Today, the first Saturday in June, is National Trails Day, a day sponsored and promoted by the American Hiking Society to help promote the creation, upkeep and use of America’s 200,000+ miles of public-access trails.  Created in 1993, the day has its roots in 1987′s report from the President’s Commission on Americans Outdoors, which endorsed the creation of a network of trails that would allow every single person... (more...)

A quick cellphone snapshot from the trail. Throughout the recovery process for my posterior tibial tendinitis and associated challenges, I’ve been doing a great deal of physical therapy that targets all of the stabilizing muscles in the lower legs.  From rocker boards and wobble boards to stability pods, balance discs, foam rollers, resistance bands and a variety of balance exercises, I’ve been aggressively challenged with movements that have me on one foot, eyes closed, balancing precariously... (more...)

Found in the middle of the woods with no children for miles, was this sign instead telling me that running with bad form will make you slow? Or perhaps it was a reminder that, still recovering from injury, I should take today's run slow... No, this isn’t a 2,000 word essay on listening to your body, avoiding injury and running safe.  It’s just a picture of a silly little sign that I saw today on the drive through the woods to the trailhead. Normally I’d simply consider this... (more...)

Last week, a new article over on the Runner’s World website caught my eye.  Authored by William Roberts, MD, it appeared in their Ask the Sports Doc section and was entitled The Mechanics of Barefoot Running.  I’m always excited to see something on the topic of barefoot running appear over there, or in their print magazine, because it means that the subject is getting mainstream exposure.  There have been pro-barefoot as well as no-barefoot articles that have appeared, and there is... (more...)

Photo by Justin Bastien, snagged and cropped from scottjurek.com Scott Jurek, vegan ultramarathon athlete and seven-time consecutive winner of the Western States 100 (really, that’s just the tip of the iceberg) just alerted his Twitter followers to a great article about him in today’s New York Times. Diet and Exercise to the Extremes, by Mark Bittman, takes a quick look at what it’s like to have “training weeks of 140 miles and more, ‘easy’ runs of 40 miles and... (more...)

Roderick with *gasp* a shoe! By now, if you’ve been following the postings on this blog, you’ve realized that barefoot running is more about the biomechanics of running barefoot than it is about running completely free of all footwear.  Sure, there are purists out there who swear by barefoot and barefoot only – skin to ground, and never shall the two be parted – but when it comes down to it, barefoot running is worth pursuing because of the modifications that it naturally makes to your stride,... (more...)