Today's Walk - Sammamish River Trail (WA)

Today, despite it being my allowed "day off" of exercise, I decided I wanted to take advantage of the nice weather and walk along the Sammamish River Trail. I live in Western Washington state and we're very lucky in the number of trails, paths, parks, etc we have. Many of these are multi-use trails where bikers, walkers, runners, skaters, etc. all share the trail. For the most part, this works really well and the vast majority of people follow the basic rules and are nice to each other.

The Sammamish River Trail is 10.9 miles in full, all paved. I love the river and all the plant, insect and wildlife I get to see. In fact, I meander along it with my camera quite a bit. Today was obviously Canada Goose day as a lot of them were bobbing in the river, looking for snacks.

I enjoyed my walk and put a link to the map generated by my Garmin Forerunner during the walk at the top of this post. See - DATA!

I slathered on a lot of sunscreen, filled the smaller Camelbak with water, brought my good sunglasses and set off in my VFF.

Things I'll do differently next time:

• Burp the Camelbak. The sloshing was a bit annoying.
• Put ice in the Camelbak (we don't use much ice at my house so rarely have any - might have to stop somewhere). The water got pretty warm after a bit.
• Take chapstick. The sunscreen did well on most of my skin but my lips suffered a bit.
• Go earlier in the day. It gets a bit crowded at noonish on a weekend.
• Remember my iPod.

What a lovely day for a walk.

Oh - and I realized I got 5K done in under an hour. Woohoo!

Shin Splints & Shoes

When I decided to get fit again, one of the things I really wanted to do was become a runner. I ran track in high school and really enjoyed it. I guess I'd both like some of that feeling back as well as just getting in better shape and losing weight.

Like a lot of people, this is not my first attempt to get into shape or start running but this is my first truly serious one. I remembered that last time I tried, I had a lot of knee, hip and ankle pain before long and I wasn't as heavy then as I am now. This was in spite of my podiatrist-recommended motion-control running shoes.

I'd done a lot of reading about the barefoot running movement and wondered if this would be better for me. I know many people have many opinions of it but I'm a strong believer in personal choice and this is my choice to try. So telling me how wrong I am will not make a difference, trust me. :)

I didn't want to be completely barefoot, though, because the soles of my feet are quite soft and sensitive - not a lot of callouses - so I decided to give Vibram FiveFingers a try. A trip to REI and trying on the many styles led me to the ones pictured above - the Vibram Komodosport. They fit wonderfully right off, even if friends did refer to them as "Avatar Water Socks." I never thought they'd come in periwinkle myself!

I then started to walk on the treadmill at the gym until I worked myself up to running short intervals - like run 1 minute, walk 4 minutes. I noticed that the bottom of my feet ached a bit, most likely from the combination of being weak from wearing supportive shoes and from a lot of weight landing on them. Mind you this is not the screaming pain of plantar fasciitis (been there), it's a diffuse, generalized ache that lasts about 4-5 steps when I first get up in the morning. Then it's gone.

The VFF did force me to mid-foot strike and not heel strike, another reason I wanted to try barefoot running. It's hard to heel strike when it hurts a lot and I had been told I did so in my running past. I wanted to break that habit as I re-learned how to run.

I had a few twinges of pain along the front of my shin when running but nothing bad. Then I decided to try an experiment to see what happened if I wore my motion-control running shoes. This may be the cause of my current situation.

My form was basically the same but I had quite a bit more shin pain. This was this last Saturday. Since the bottoms of my feet still ached the next morning, I decided this was not the way to go and today I went back to the VFF.

Except today I had even MORE shin pain, to the point I knocked off my run intervals after 20 minutes and just walked the other 30 minutes. Now my shins are sore to the touch along the shin bone and I think I have a case of shin splints.

Needless to say, I am NOT pleased. But I know I have to deal with it now. So it's Aleve, BioFreeze and only walking for at least a week at which time I'll see if they are still tender.

Logic says that this may have happened anyway, even without the running shoe switch. It's a very common problem and may have been caused more by my lack of slow build up to the intervals but, either way, no running for a bit.

Ah well, the Couch to 5K can wait and I can walk the 5K I have planned with a friend for Nov/Dec if I need to. But I'll stick with the VFF for now.