Minimalist running: Last month of winter

Distance 73km [total: minimalist 329.1km: Barefoot 4823.5km] Week31

Wednesday, 24-July. 10km

A good 10km run but my legs were a bit sore from the gym on Sunday. Overdoing the lunges and leg presses have left the legs a bit flat. The sun is going down while I'm half way back, in another few weeks I will be finishing with the sun still above the horizon.
The first run of the spring is just around the corner, the City to Bay run, the biggest run in the state with 10's of thousands running. I may go down and take some photos but I won't run, it is too expensive and too busy, I'll wait for the Christmas run and see if I can complete it this time.

Friday, 26-July. 10.5km

I need to pick up my speed a bit as I'm getting overtaken by a few of my shoe wearing brothers. I haven't done much speedwork for a year so I have not got that burst I need when I go into races. My calf had a bit of a knot that threatened to tighten towards the end of my run. I staved it off by relaxing my calves, it's good that I can feel it before it comes on and cramps.

Saturday, 27-July. 13km

My runs this year have been shorter than they were a year previous. At this time last year I was running 15km -20km. The disruption of the holiday midway during the year has reduced my distances, but, then again, its not a race to get the highest didtances over a week. When I get fixated on doing long distances I can miss small signals that indicate I might be on the way to an injury. Distance isn't everything and I think I'm getting too old to worry about trying to win a race unless it is in some veterans category.

Monday, 29-July. 10km

The days are getting slightly longer now so it is not totally dark when I finish my run. I have to divert from the beach path that I usually take as it is being revamped and as usual they seem to take forever. Lots of digging with heavy machinery, I assume they must be making a shared cycle/walkway which would be wider than the older path, hopefully it will be converted to a nice concrete pathway, a bit more barefoot friendly than the wonky brick path that I had to negotiate carefully in the dark.

Thursday, 1-Aug. 10.5km

The warmest day of the week with the daytime temperature reaching a high of 19C, this made for some warmth in the ground that my feet could detect as I ran my out and back run to West Beach. I'd had a busy day at work and left the office with a headache and a longing to get out into the fresh air and get the body moving. The body did thank me for it and I had a great sleep that night. I did get a slight bruise on the underside of my foot when I landed on a stone due to a bit of carelessness on my part.

Saturday, 3-Aug. 13km

Quite a fight with the wind today as I ran up to Semaphore. The wind speed at the airport was 35km/h, on the beach it would have been over 40km/h. It slowed me down by around 10 minutes on the run north. The reward for all the hard effort was to have the wind behind me and run at a much faster speed on the way back. On the way back I came across a dead dolphin calf washed up on the incoming tide. It was around 1.5m long and had probably been dead for a day poor thing. I reported it to the animal marine rescue group so they could take it away for testing.

Sunday, 4-Aug. 6km

Well, here we are again the First Sunday of the Month barefoot run and we are assembled in the car park near the River Torrens close to the Adelaide zoo. In contrast to the weather that came in during the afternoon yesterday of thrashing rain, today was mild and sunny. The ground was still wet and there was plenty of debris knocked off the trees by the storm. There was 4 of us who went for a run today, Myself, David, Kathy and Michael. We ran a weaving loop around the river and sports fields on a variety of surfaces and quite a bit of mud. The good thing about being barefoot is not worrying about getting shoes wet and muddy, you clean your feet by running through puddles. After the run and reuniting with half of our party that got lost we headed to the local deli for a coffee.