This the first running post that I have written for a very long time and I am experiencing an incredible sense of release. It feels like I have been circling for years and have landed somewhere safe. After less than 24 hours, Ageing Runner already feels like home.
I have been in a lonely place. A few years ago, I was blogging almost daily. I was a broken runner looking for a way to run in a therapeutic way that nurtured rather than damaged my body.
Like most in my position, I spent a lot of money trying to fix things. I found a whole industry happy to take my money. I was diligent but didn’t find a solution. Before I knew it, five years had passed and I had been on the sidelines for most of it. In my head I was a still a runner. I was just a runner who couldn’t run.
I had things going on with my feet, calves, hip and groin. It felt like I was at the end of the road. I joined my local gym and saw lots of faces I recognised from over the years. It was like a graveyard of broken runners. There was not a lot of joy in their faces, they pretty much looked the way I felt. Bereft of a core part of their life. I could not let that be me.
I read a lot. I found Danny Dreyer’s ChiRunning and gave it a really good go. I read Chris McDougall’s Born to Run . I dabbled with barefooting but ironically ended up with more shoes than ever. I had Vivobarefoot, Sockwa, Merrels, Lunas, Xeros, Freets and Vibram Fivefingers. I had a lovely pair of Runamoks (beautifully hand-crafted running moccasins) and even a pair of German engineered chain mail shoes. You can’t buy barefoot running but there were plenty of people out there ready to sell it to me.
None of them solved my problem. I couldn’t spend my way of this one. It wasn’t the shoes, it was my inability to run in them in a way that was healthy.
I decided to ditch the shoes completely and rebuild by stride from the ground up. I started small and made the commitment to run barefoot every day for a year. My first run was 40 seconds. It took three months to get to the 5k point. Across the year, I covered over 1000 miles in total (including a barefoot marathon) and my running style had changed completely.
I started the ‘Barefoot Beginner’ blog looking for a way to run injury free. I enjoyed building a community of like minded runners but my own project came to a natural conclusion and my connection to the community faded away.
Years later, here I am, blogging about running again…and it feels good.
I hope you can join me on this exploration of running as we age. It is a race we are all running. I would love to hear your thoughts, worries and words of wisdom.
We run, we chat, we smile.
Chris
