I’m taking time out from writing my race report from my successful running of the Western States 100 Mile Endurance Run this last weekend in my VFFs to lend my support to a student research project looking to see if there are significant differences in injury rates between shod and unshod runners. Rebecca’s message about her project is below. I encourage you to contact her at River.barefoot.running@gmail.com if you are willing to take part in this survey based study.
Rebecca’s message:
“Hello! I am a junior in Vancouver, WA who is conducting a research project related to barefoot running. I am looking at injury rates of barefoot runners versus shod runners and also within runners who are transitioning to barefoot or minimalist running. I am planning on collecting data through emailed surveys over a 3-4 month timer period. Currently I am looking for runners (esp. barefoot/minimalist or transitioning) who would be interested in participating. Your participation would include (1) entrance survey, (1) exit survey and a series of bi-weekly surveys. The study will be conducted from June (or July) to October. All information collected will be completely anonymous and you can choose to opt out at any time. Participation in this study will help evaluate the potential benefits of barefoot running in reducing injury rates in long distance runners. If you are 18-70 years old, run at least 20 miles a week and have run for at least 2 years, are not participating in collegiate or high school sports then you are eligible to participate. If you are interested or have any questions, please contact me at River.barefoot.running@gmail.com
I will add you to the list of participants.
Thanks, Rebecca
There’s a long running thread on the usenet newsgroup rec.sports.unicycling titled “Who has completed a 100 mile ride?” with the purpose of logging the answer to that question. As of today, 30 May 2010, the list includes 55 names:
Peter Bier
David Stone
Roger Davies
Alan Chambers
Steve Colligan
Mark Wiggins
Takayuki Koike (record holder 6hrs44min)
Lars Clausen
Ken Looi
Floyd Beattie
Johnnie Severin
Cathy Fox
Bruce Dawson
Jack Hughes
Dan Heaton
Scot Cooper
Sam Wakeling
Chuck Edwall
Joe Marshall
John Himsworth
Gracie Sorbello
Rowan Chivers
Tony Melton
Tim Lee
Joe Lind
Rob Muellerleile
Irene Genelin
Beau Hoover
Nathan Hoover
Mike Scalisi
Ryan Woessner
?~Xivind Johansen
Kjetil Juul Pedersen
James Amon
Leif Rustvold
Max Taint
Mark Osmundo
Mike Tierney
Joseph Sherman
Roland Kays
Claude Magnuson
Jan Logemann
Zeke Boisei
Paul Stacey
Joe Myers
Matthew Huber
Tom Blackwood
Sid Rajan
Dave Cox
Matthiew Rojda
Kevin Williams
Jack Olsen
Monty McFly
Matt Thomas
Geoff Houghton
Congratulations to all of these distance minimalists!
You can keep track of the conversation via your favorite usenet newsreader, or on the thread at Unicyclist.com which seems to do a better job of keeping the thread intact than the version on Google Groups. Of course new additions to this list make news here at Distance Minimally as well!
[list updated Mar 20th, 2010 from rec.sports.unicycling to 54 names]
[list updated May 30th, 2010 from rec.sports.unicycling to 55 names]
One month from now I should be relaxing in Placer High School’s field after a good hard run and not to mention long run of the Western States 100 Mile Endurance Run. I’m feeling good about that. I’ve had some very encouraging long endurance events this Spring, not to mention my experience in running difficult trail 100s since 2006, that tell me I’m ready for this challenge. But I do wish I was in better shape. Isn’t that always the case? But yes, when I started this process, mailing my first application for the race in 2006, I imagined that heading in to WS100 I would be in the best shape of my life. I have to confess that this is not the case. I’m pleased with my fitness but I have not had the singular focus it takes to feel I’m at my best. As evident by my radio silence here at Distance Minimally, my running life has had to take a bit of a back seat lately to, well, life. But no more! As race day approaches I’ll be focusing on what it takes to be all I can be as I toe the line in Squaw Valley in 30 days.
Join myself and other barefoot/minimalist runners on 24 April 2010 at the Energy Events Earth Day Run in Portland, OR. What better venue to arrive in numbers and run as we are made to run? There are 5K and 10K races, stroller friendly, dog friendly, and kids runs as well. I’ll be there with my rickshaw!
http://www.energyevents.com/EarthDayRun
The combination of winning a free entry to the Fort Vancouver Runs from OregonLive.com on 28 March, and my daughter asking to go to another race for her 4th birthday this weekend, meant a wonderful barefoot morning with dad and daughters on Sunday. The girls are getting a little big for their rickshaw but I have the next generation ride in the works. I did the 15K but I think that on this race my passengers would have preferred the 10K. After my run it was balloon animals and other kids fare until the 1K kids’ fun run. My 4 year old did great in her purple minimalist running slippers, running the full distance for the first time and one of the only kids out there with perfect human running form. I even met another local barefooter, although he was in his “Clark Kent” disguise as a spectator wearing some running shoes :)
I asked my daughters what their favorite part of the day was and my oldest said “the whole thing!” Good times.
I’m thankful for all of the support I had in the One Day Run for Hunger. With the help of a great many we raised $1045 for the Oregon Food Bank, and as chance would have it this matched exactly my goal of $10/mile as I logged 104.5 miles in those 24 hours. That was good enough to take home a plaque for 4th place. I had a great support crew, from my father who was there from setup to pack up, friends who came out to support me through the morning and afternoon, and my wife who stayed all night and joined me for 12 miles in her Vibram Five Fingers. I was also pleased to see supportive messages during the run from people cheering me on through the internet. When the run got very tough late in the night, all of that positivity really kept me going. In the end there was just too much sharp gravel to make an attempt at a fully barefoot run, and I wore Vibram Five Fingers for the majority of the race. I did put in a few miles early in the race running barefoot on that beautiful sunny day around Lake Sacajawea.
I’m working on my race report, I think there’s much worth sharing from the run, but I wanted to get the word out here that I surivived, and my feet did too as shown after the race!
Follow the updates at @zekeboisei on Twitter or the Distance Minimally page on Facebook!
With all of your help we exceeded my fundraising goal of $1000 for the Oregon Food Bank, and am shooting for 100+ miles! Wish me luck!
And a barefoot running story to boot! Check out the great Tail Winds cover shot by Brad Jones at RB Jones Photography, and the articles on pages 10 and 11 about Max and my 109 mile ride of El Tour de Tucson and my record barefoot running of the Dean Karnazes Rock n Roll 50k.
(For the record, we don’t know any circus songs and Vibram Five Fingers are not “just like running barefoot”)
[Update 1: Minor text updates and added write up to this post instead of just linking to the original post]
Recently there was a study by Dr. David Carrier on the efficiency of different foot positions while walking, most notably a heel-strike vs a forefoot strike. The results showed that heel striking was more efficient than forefoot striking while walking. Many, particularly in the barefoot community, disagreed with some of his methods and results. In particular the choice of a forefoot strike that did not have the heel drop fully to the ground struck many as different than the forefoot strike that they might use with the heel dropping completely to the ground.
I did a little experiment to begin looking at these questions that have been raised. The initial experiment was very small, just a cursory look at the question, but it replicated Carrier’s results and gave an initial answer to the question of whether an alternate footstrike would have shown different results. In this preliminary experiment, a heel strike walking gait was more efficient than a forefoot strike with or without the heel contacting the ground, and there was not a significant difference between efficiency of a forefoot strike with and without the heel contacting the ground.
This article at present is placeholder for one that I intend to expand upon with a less hurried experiment, analysis, and write-up than I post here, but for now here is a cleaned up copy of post where I quickly describe it, after the jump.
“Some new science about how we evolved to walk”
Very quick write up of a very quick experiment.
Short version: In my own little experiment heel strike was more
efficient than ball-heel-ball or the low-digitgrade from Carrier’s
paper, while the ball-heel-ball and low-digitgrade did not
significantly differ. One subject with three measurements on three
gaits.
Long version:
Heart rate monitor used to measure energy expenditure on treadmill set
to 3.5mph.
Heel-strike (plantigrade), Ball-heel-ball, and Forefoot strike (low-
digitgrade) compared.
3 minute warmup on each, one minute of observation with 3 data points
at 30 second intervals, 3 minute seated rest between observations.
ANOVA comparison of bpm by gait, bpm was significantly affected by
gait.
Mean(sd) of each:
Heel strike: 102.33(1.53)
Ball-heel-ball: 115.33(2.08)
Forefoot strike: 117.67(2.08)
T-test for pairwise comparisons.
Heel strike v. ball-heel-ball: p=0.0014
Heel strike v. Forefoot: p=0.0008
Ball-heel-ball v. Forefoot: p=0.2417
Heel strike was significantly lower than either ball-heel-ball or
forefoot, while ball-heel-ball and forefoot did not significantly
differ.
It turns out that January’s barefoot 50K at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Ultra 50K with a time of 4:14:52 was enough to earn the title of “World Record” for fastest barefoot 50K kept on Barefoot Ken Bob’s Running Barefoot site.
I have to admit, this didn’t even occur to me, even when I realized that my run had a place on his results page, until Ken Bob responded by pointing out that it was the fastest on record. This got me wondering, what am I really capable of as a barefoot ultrarunner?
At this month’s One Day Run For Hunger, I will be running barefoot/minimalist for 24 hour hours to raise money to fight hunger in our communities. I’ve run a 100 mile mountainous trail ultramarathon in Vibram Five Fingers, so I’m confident that I have what it takes to run at least 100 miles in 24 hours without running shoes. My question becomes: how far can I go barefoot?
Long ultramarathons are already full of unknowns. Adding in the factor of extending my barefoot mileage would increase those unknowns, but could well earn me a world record for farthest barefoot run in a 24 hour timed event.
There are challenges that I would not have included if I set this up to set a world record. Existing records have been set on smooth cushy tracks, while this is a groomed trail with a stretch of gravel on the loop course I’m a bit concerned about. I’ve done gravel on similar courses without issue, but I don’t know how happy I would be happy to run over it 100 times.
Tell me what you think. Play it safe or set the bar high? As I’ve already said, I will be toeing the line barefoot and running the whole thing without shoes. I already have it in mind to see what I can do with just me feet. But I’m curious to hear from you.
Let me know here, on the Facebook group, or even on the One Day Run For Hunger fund raising page.
This was the last of my usual races where I took off my shoes. Last year, after I had long been running barefoot/minimalist at all of my other races, I just wasn’t sure about all that mud. My feet had been soaked in my Vibram Five Fingers at the Angeles Crest 100 Mile Endurance Run in September 2008, and blistered in a way that I didn’t think happened to me in VFFs. So in February 2009 I decided to wear New Balance 790s, purchased for possible use in my 2009 100 miler that I eventually ran in VFFs, just to be safe. In the year since, however, my commitment to minimalist and barefoot running increased, and I had even toyed with running the race barefoot. Other events on my day’s calendar didn’t allow me the time to confidently set out barefoot though, and so I decided to wear my Trek KSOs. I figured the Treks would provide a little traction in all the mud this course is known for, but I also had my regular KSOs on hand with a new pair of socks if I needed to change because of any hot spots or blisters from wet feet. With that I set off on what five years earlier was my first ultramarathon, the Hagg Lake 50K.
The trail around the lake is a bit under 15 miles, so there is an out-and-back on road at the beginning. It’s mostly on gravel going up a big hill, just to make sure we don’t get the wrong idea about the race being too easy just because it’s mostly “flat”. As usual I was racing to the start when the cow bell sounded and sent the runners on their way. And so I started dead last without my number on or pins to put it on. It started in my hands, and then was shoved into my pocket with plans to get pins when we passed by the start again, and was only dug out of my pocket again for the finish.
A pleasant surprise early in the course was that instead of detouring onto the road early in the loop around the lake, as we had done for the last 5 years, we crossed a creek where the bridge had been out all the previous years. The bridge was still out, but we were given a way across and a volunteer was on hand to make sure we made it successfully. Then onward around the lake.
I was going at a chipper pace, but didn’t feel like I was overdoing it. About 15 miles into the race, however, I faded a little hard. It didn’t feel like I had run too hard, it felt more like I was just having a tough time making it past “the wall” to efficient fat metabolism. The group of runners I was leading all eventually passed me and I settled in with the cohort of runners behind us. I was also playing my nutrition a little fast and loose for this “short” race, having mostly “sports food” rather than focusing as much as possible on water and fruit and then spiking that with extra calories as needed. At the last aid station on the first loop I switched to my “cleaner” eating, made sure to get some electrolytes, and would drop my hat and gloves off by my car before starting the second loop.
Like an annual tradition, the winner of the 25K came charging up behind me as I ran the last bit of trail before starting the second loop. I seem to run about 30K of a casual muddy 50K almost exactly one hour slower than the fastest runners run 25K on the same course. After changing things up a bit I began to feel better, and was able to start pushing the pace again. Doing some math I saw that a sub-5 hour finish was in my reach, something I’d only done once in the 5 previous times I’d run this course, and that motivated me to keep my pace up. It was a bit tough at times with the mud bogs and slippery slopes. I was passing people again, and started catching glimpses of some of that cohort ahead of me that had left me behind. I’m not competitive in my running, but passing people still feels good. On my second loop through the muddiest part of the course, in the last 7 miles of the race, I stopped dodging the deep mud and puddles and just pushed through. I had a pace to keep up.
I managed to get in the middle of the now diffuse cohort I had been running with before, ahead of some and behind others, and really started charging in the last couple miles. I hadn’t started my watch for a few minutes after the race started, so I didn’t know exactly how much time I had left before 5 hours, but I knew it was close. It felt good to run fast, and to be able to run fast. I wondered what my time would have been like if I’d been able to run to exhaustion instead of spending some time in the middle in an extended “ultramarathon moment”. I crossed the finish at 5:02:23 on the official clock.
Running in something other than shoes still gets quite a bit of attention, but I noticed with this race people had heard of it. Many knew me, as my reputation as a barefoot runner has spread in our running community, and of course there has been much media attention to the topic. Instead of being outside the box I was a living breathing running example of something many had only read about, but at least most had that exposure. Some people thought my muddy Vibrams were bare feet under all that muck. Next time?
Beginning on the morning of Saturday 20 March 2010, I will be running for 24 hours at the Pacific Rim One Day Run raising money to fight hunger. I will be toeing the line barefoot, and will run the whole race without shoes. I hope to run 100 miles, and raise $10 per mile. Contributions will go to the Oregon Food Bank through Firstgiving.
Can you sponsor one or more miles to help me reach my goal of raising $1000 for the hungry in our communities?
Visit One Day Run For Hunger at http://www.firstgiving.com/onedayrunforhunger
Thanks!
I have a small part in CNN’s take on the barefoot running debate, in between discussion of Dr. Lieberman’s article showing barefoot style running land with lower impact forces and Dr. Carrier’s article showing that our heel strike walking gait is more efficient than the forefoot strikes of other nearby species.
The quotes are pretty heavily paraphrased and out of context. I must say, if I didn’t know I took part in the interview I’m not sure I’d recognize the words attributed to me!
After exchanging a few emails with Kelly Johnson from the OregonLive.com’s Run Oregon blog, a nice write up about my development as a barefoot runner was posted this weekend. I think Kelly did about as good a job as any I’ve seen on discussing the topic, as well as my reasoning for and experience with it. Enjoy!
Add to the list of forthcoming race reports this weekend’s Inaugural Dean Karnazes Rock ‘n’ Roll Ultra 50K, part of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Arizona Marathon events. Briefly, it was a well planned and executed 50K, even if it was a bit odd to do our extra 4.85 miles at the start and then line up with the other runners for the regular marathon start. It was nice to have the ultra-amenities as could be provided to the smaller 50K group, including mingling with the run’s namesake himself. Dean Karnazes seems like a stand up guy, although he sticks pretty close to his Ultramarathon Man shtick. I thought he might be interested in chatting with another runner pushing the boundaries, as it seems to me a barefoot ultramarathoner is doing, but it seemed like a distinct non-subject to this North Face sponsored shoe endorsing running personality. That said, he gave me a fist bump and a sincere “good race man” after I came through the finish a few moments after him, with a glance at the not-to-be-mentioned bare feet. The race itself was enjoyable and well planned. A nice tour of the Phoenix metropolitan area, good replenishment along the course, enjoyable bands, and spectator presence throughout the course. The marathon environment pushed me to run harder than I usually do in the more relaxed ultra environment, and I set a PR by an impressive margin. I exceeded my best expected time of 4:30 to come in just under 4:15. My feet treated me well, with only some rough asphalt in the last blocks giving me any real pause. Rather my legs and general energy stores ran low before my soles did, leading me to slow a bit in the last miles. Not having my feet be the limiting factor in a barefoot 50K was an exciting testament to the ability to run extreme distances without shoes. At the end of the race, I relaxed with a beverage that it would be overly generous to call “beer”, provided free to race participants, and listened to the live musical stylings of my hometown’s Everclear. Friend and photographer Brad Jones was on hand to document the run for an upcoming article in Tailwinds magazine. All in all it was a very pleasant visit to Arizona, an enjoyable race, and I left with a great sense of accomplishment with my first barefoot ultramarathon performance.