When I started this I knew I would likely
follow no methodology to adapt to minimal shoes. As I stated on the previous post I decided to
ignore the “10% rule” during the first trainings and, surprise, I’m still ignoring
it now, after 5 trainings on minimal shoes, all over 10kms.
And despite taking this risk, the “listen
to your body “ rule is working and I have made significant progress and
learning.
Another disclaimer here: I’m an experienced
runner, I’ve been running for quite a lot of years now (and hopefully a lot
more to come). This is just to share my experience, not my methodology ;)
As said before I have completed 5 trainings
over 10kms exclusively on minimal. Some
learning:
Landing on the forefoot is now easier and
automatic. The shoes invite you to lean a little bit forward when running and
this makes the landing on the forefoot process easier. As a result the stride
is probably slightly shorter, I have to count those over 1km in order to
confirm this.
Calves have more stress, now they have to
work more than before. After the first training over 10km the calves were hard
as I had ran a race, and the day after… wow they were pretty sore. But nothing
that couldn’t be solved with a little bit of stretching.
As the gravity centre is lower you feel
more confortable on uneven surfaces but whenever you step over a sharp stone,
ouch, it hurts. Maybe the f-lites 195 are not appropriate for rocky surfaces.
The last training (13km) I was tired. Due to that I took me a little bit of extra
effort and concentration not to land on my heels. I guess my calves were asking
for a little bit of rest J
In the middle of those 5 trainings I did
one on conventional shoes, and the first strides were strange, as the body was
asking to land on the forefoot. But you get back to the conventional landing
easily.
My question now is: imagine I do adapt 100%
to minimal shoes… how is it combining conventional shoes and minimal shoes on a
regular basis? Does it make any sense?
