After yesterday’s rant about shoes, I finally decided to go barefoot for a run & see what happened. I spend most of my time barefoot and run in minimalistic shoes, so I didn’t think it would be much of a transition.
It felt great. I ran 4.18 km in the 30 minutes at an average pace of 7:10 mins/km, average heart rate of 151 bpm.
It was so easy to control my heart rate today, so I pretty much sat on 151 bpm the whole time. Walking dropped my heart rate like a stone. Main reason for that is I can’t stride out barefoot like I do in shoes, meaning I can’t walk as fast. That’s something to carry over to my shod runs.
I won’t be doing many runs barefoot just yet. The skin of the soles of my feet isn’t quite ready for it. Picked up two blisters, but they didn’t pop, so there’s no risk of infection. I might do 1 barefoot run a week and see how it goes. I think I’ll do it on grass til I build up skin toughness. Today’s was on the sidewalk, which is concrete.
It’s amazing how light you feel running barefoot. I already have pretty good running form, so I didn’t need to change anything there. But I’d imagine it would be almost impossible for a heel striker to run barefoot without injury. I usually run lightly, with just a gentle sound as my feet hit the ground, but this was something else entirely. I could barely (pun intended lol) hear my footsteps.