Take that, Peter Lorre
By Thom David
The last half-marathon I ran was the America’s Finest City, on San Diego’s hottest day of the year in August 2012. I ran shod, and predictably, after the race I was injured, this time in my hip. I’d just started reading Born to Run, but was only about a third of the way through it. Still to come was McDougall’s spirited indictment of the running shoe industry, his account of Lieberman’s Harvard study on barefoot running, and Caballo Blanco gliding over hills in the Copper Canyon. I had no idea how my running life was about to change.
Little did I know it at the time, but this would be my last shod race.
AFC was brutal. I’m not a hot weather runner, full stop. By the end of that race, I had a gloomy sense that I might be nearing the end of my running life, given both age and my propensity for injury. As soon as I got home, however, I ignored all that and entered the Carlsbad race. The AFC is the final leg in the San Diego Triple Crown, a series of three half-marathons beginning with Carlsbad in January. In April, the La Jolla Half, with its hellish 5% grade mile-and-a-quarter Torrey Pines Hill is the creamy nougat center of this yearly SoCal racing confection. I’d decided sometime during the AFC — probably before the pain set in — that I would run all three the following year.
As I nursed my hip, I finished reading BTR. Of course, it got me thinking about barefoot running and whether or not it might be the answer to my own injury problem. After a few days a favorite nearby trail became the site of a self-conscious barefoot test run, and the rest, as for many a barefoot runner, is history. I was hooked, and it soon became apparent that I wouldn’t go back to shod running again if I could help it.
But it was early September, and Carlsbad was in January. I really doubted that I would be able to prepare in time, given the plentiful warnings about doing too much too soon and literally having to start from square one when learning to run without shoes. I had to make an uneducated decision: go back to shoes to train for this race, or swallow the fear and uncertainty, train barefoot, and hope for mere survival. If I was going to keep to my plan to run the Triple Crown, a shod Carlsbad would mean that the other two races would likely have to be shod as well. There just wouldn’t be enough time between events to make the transition as slowly as I probably should. So, that nailed it. Barefoot it was going to be, whether or not I was sure I could do it. To read more: http://www.barefootrunningvegan.com/blog/1stbfhalf/
