Sunday, 28 December 2014

Journey to minimalist running: increasing the distance.

In the last update I'd reached 1k in my new shoes. Since then I've been slowly increasing the distance.
I did a 1100m jog which felt great. I didn't go for a jog in quite a while after that, but the next time, I took my iPod with me with a file that has a 180 bmp beat on it and lifted my feet to that rhythm. This felt a bit odd at first but  after a minute or so it felt just fine! That was my 1200m jog and it felt good too! I could clearly feel my calves after this one though! I also did a short sprint in my backyard after this.

The next run, I intended to jog 1300m. I planned out my route but couldn't find a certain street whilst I was running, so I ended up jogging about 1550m and felt just fine after that too. I also did that same sprint afterwards - sprinting is so much more enjoyable than jogging!

Then I did a bit more reading, and found that it's okay to add 1/8th mile to every run, which is about 200m! So I wanted to run 1750m on the next run, but did 1840m. This time I mixed up the routes I had planned in my head. It happened to be a relatively fast run (for my standards). My last run was a 2k one, which was a bit slower. With all these runs, I didn't have any complaints apart from my calves being sore during the run (but never afterwards).

In between these runs, I've been doing 5k's too. I've been running nearly every day in the past weeks, which I never thought I would! In the new shoes, my calves need to do a lot of work, but in the old ones my right foot tends to ace and both feet start going numb after about 4k. I can't know if they'll go numb in the new shoes too though... I do enjoy running in these new shoes, and cannot wait until I made the transition! We ought to have gone for a 5k run yesterday, but we haven't since there's snow everywhere and it'd be very slippery!

Sincerely,
R.