Session 3 and 4 with the Five Fingers

Fortunately I have been sticking to the idea of getting into this slowly. The third session was a mirror of the second, although I added in some extra static training exercises that I have developed through research and experience.

The training is designed around reintroducing your lower leg and foot anatomy to a position of running that has become unfamiliar to them. I will fine tune those movements which take place barefoot on the grass and show you how it’s done in future blogs once I have refined and tested them a little more. It all seems to be working though, as the stiffness of the Soleus part of the calves has gone. I can say with confidence that this is due to patience and acting upon my inclination to just keep running freely. After three sessions I had only done a total of 15km and now, including the below session 4, I have totalled 19km.

Session 1 was 6.5km
Session 2 was 4.3km
Session 3 was 4km

My fourth session took place this morning. I swapped the Bikila Five Fingers for the more generic version that was not specifically designed for running, but to KSO – Keep Stuff Out. These are definitely not designed for running trail, but are very versatile and I took them on the Lions Head ascent and decent which was just awesome.

The toes are free to work real hard and they do; giving you much more balance, dexterity and access to the full range of movement down there in the metatarsals. I zipped up the rocks – no problems. Coming down though was not great when there is sand on rocks and the gradient is steep. The outer sole is not that grippy and I had to watch my footing in a few places of sand covered rocks. I could only feel stones through the really gnarly sections of the route, but that was not enough to take away from the overall brilliant freedom of the run up. Have a little gander at the video I made for you just a couple of hours ago…below!

The video was shot with my new favourite toy, the GoPro Helmet Hero. It is one brilliant piece of tech. Check it out in March ’11 issue of Runner’s World.