An exercise update: going barefoot.

Spring is here, and there's only a few months left until bikini season. So how's exercising been? Well it's been awful for a while: I haven't been doing my planks and running was going bad. I neglected the planking because my shoulders were all tense (I'm getting that fixed now) and running wasn't going well because I've been under a lot of stress lately. But now I'm getting back on track with running and I'm doing it barefoot! Care to know how that's going? Keep reading!

Since it's been warming up a little I ended my regular runs with a few laps around the backyard on my bare feet. Then, I joined my sister to the athletics track on a warm day and ran two laps without shoes, and ran a bit more with my shoes on. I enjoyed it it a lot, but didn't want to overdo it.

On the next run it was too cold, so I only did one lap on bare feet and a few more in shoes. Temperatures below 15°C are too cold for barefoot running I've noticed. It just hurts and if your feet get cold they may go numb, which may cause you to end up hurting yourself.

After this things got more serious and I ran three laps barefoot. My sister joined me on the last one too! Two weeks ago I did a run of 6 laps without any pain afterwards.

In this past week the weather was good and I was motivated to do more. So I added some distance and ran two runs of  8 laps each on Monday and Wednesday. They both went well, and the second was a whole two minutes faster than the first! Then I felt ready for a bit more distance, so I ran 10 laps on Friday! That's 4k! If it keeps on going this well, I might be able to run my 'standard' 5k all barefoot in a week or two! It's nice to see progress and I've been enjoying my runs. It is a bit uncomfortable in the first lap or so. But I do enjoy these runs, I wouldn't keep going without shoes if I hadn't!

My last run was on Wednesday. A. and I went for a 4k run in the street, and I did it all barefoot. It was a lot more uncomfortable than the track as the most of the streets on our route are very rough! My feet need some more rest now and I'll go back to the track next time.

I hope temperatures keep up so I can keep it up!
Sincerely,
R.