Coping with post-marathon depression

Tags

coping, depression, goals, marathon, post marathon, purple crowned fairy wren, running

Okay, so here is a thing I was not expecting.  After I finished the marathon on Sunday, I had a brief flush of pride and a feeling of accomplishment…and then a complete let-down.  I started thinking things like, “Well, my time was really not that good.” and “It’s really not something to be proud of.” and I didn’t end up telling anyone that I had just run a marathon.

After all, none of my friends or family knew I was training in the first place.  So it was easy to come into work and smile and chat and pretend like nothing unusual had happened that weekend.

I tried to go for a run the day after and found that my legs were weak and useless, though I felt fine riding my bike and swimming.

And bad thoughts started flooding back in.  I lost whatever confidence I had gained from being a “marathon runner”.

So this morning, disappointed in a slow swim time, I googled “post-marathon depression” and found out that it is actually a thing!  Huh, guess I’m not alone.  Knowing that helps, so here’s my plan for coping and maybe it will find someone going through something similar.

1.  Have another goal!  Part of the depression comes from the absence of a target or objective.  I’m a very goal-oriented person, after all, and I’ve been training for this marathon for 6 months.  So…it’s triathlon season!  I’m going to aim for a PR in a sprint tri in early July.

2.  Ease back into running.  My body is not as recovered as I would like.  This is going to be a week of long walks, bike rides, and swimming, with much less emphasis on running.

3.  Treat myself to my most beautiful hikes, rides, and open water swims.  I’ve been so focused on running that it will be good to remember why I love the other sports!

4.  Don’t push too hard.  I have been pushing times and distances for a long time and I think this is a good time to relax for a little while before building again.

5.  Confess my marathon to people who I know will be supportive and proud of me,  regardless of my time.  (I’m still working on this one, haha!)

6.  Other hobbies!  It’s okay to spend a little time on my other hobbies too…like writing on this blog, baking elaborate Dr. Who cakes, and drawing birds…

Purple-crowned fairy wren

I survived my first marathon!

Tags

completed marathon, marathon, runners, running, stories, success, that was an awful lot of work, what a runner looks like

I wasn’t so much standing out in my field this weekend as I was running out of time!  Hahaha!  (hahahaha)

I ran my first marathon yesterday.  (Whoo!)  My time was 3:51:09, and I was fifth for my age group (25-30 F), which is not great, but also not bad for my first one, right??

There was a full moon! Here is a very very bad picture of it. (Hey, I was tired)

The race started at 6:00am, and the check-in time was 4:30am…and I live 2 and a half hours away.  So I got up at 1:30am, was out the door by 2:15, drove 2.5 hours, and checked in.  When I told them how far I had just driven, I got a lot of “Bless your heart”s from the volunteers around the check-in table.

Checking in at 4:45 am.

Sunrise! Getting ready to go.

I had a lot of fun running this race, but I’m not gonna lie…those last couple of miles were pretty tough.  My digestive system was definitely unhappy.  Actually, I probably would’ve been in the top three for my age group if I didn’t have to make a stop at a porta-john!  Oh well, such is life.

Driving the 2.5 hours home was also a challenge, but I thought, “This is nothing compared to those last 2 miles!”  I might think that about a lot of things now, haha.  Actually, the worst part of the drive home was trying to find a radio station that wasn’t playing Taylor Swift’s song “22″; that was real torture.  I thought I might shoot myself several times. (Don’t click that link unless you are masochistic.)

But I persevered!  You can overcome anything with real mental fortitude.

I didn’t get any photos from the actual race (because I was running and then later collapsed in a heap of exhaustion), but one of the things I was thinking about was that there is a common notion of what a runner “should” look like.  You know, tall, thin, wiry.

Kinda like what the winners of this marathon looked like:

Men’s first place winner, Lowell Ladd with a time of 2:42:11, photo by Paul Kuehnel
 of the York Sunday News

Women’s first place winner Terri Rejimbal with a time of 3:08:12, photo by Paul Kuehnel of the York Sunday Times

Boy did that first place female runner have a presence!  Watching her run was something else.

Now, I am sorta chunky and awkward.  My legs don’t look very muscular, and I have huge shoulders from swimming 9km a week.

I do not look like a runner.  But I passed a lot of people who did.

Proof! photo by Tim McGowan

The Runs

Tags

biking, friends, friendship, gifts, music, music players, running, silly, stories

I promise this post is not disgusting.  I always warn you, don’t I?

When I started grad school (5 years ago!) my sister-in-thesis (a colleague who started at the same time as I did and in the same lab) loaned me a music player to run to.  Because she and I have a similar sense of humour, she dubbed it “The Runs”.  (Because then she could tell people that she gives me The Runs, and that’s why I do all the cooking.)

The name spawned endless (sophomoric) jokes.  For example, I would run a half-marathon and she would ask me the next day how it went.  I would reply, “Well, it was great, only I had The Runs the whole time!”

Or one time when she updated the music on it for me, she named the new version of it “Extra Runny”.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about a pair of running shoes that I’ve logged more than 1500 miles on, but I just realized yesterday that the number of miles that this music player has accompanied me on far dwarfs that of any one pair of shoes.  I not only run to it, but also take it on long bike rides.

That must mean that it has traveled *literally* thousands of miles with me, on foot or by bike.

Which just might mean it was the greatest gift that anyone ever gave to me.

The Runs, grimy with sweat, mud, and sun. This thing has lasted for five years and thousands of miles.

This is what 1512.43 miles looks like…

Tags

minimalist running, photography, running, running shoes, shoes, TrekSports, Vibrams

I’ve run more than 1500 miles in my Vibram TrekSports, so I thought I’d share some photos, in case you’re wondering how long and how well the shoes hold up.  (I also run barefoot, but I alternate between barefoot runs and runs with these shoes.)

I’ve run approximately 1500 miles in these shoes…trails, asphalt, bitumen, concrete, cement, bricks, snow, ice, rain…

I am clearly a forefoot runner. This is plus 14 layers of duct tape, two layers of masking tape, and two pairs of bloody injinjis that I have burned through.  Yes, that is my toe visible through the shoe.

The old shoe (on top) compared to a new one (below). They were originally the same colour. They are the same brand, type, size…

With tripidation*

Tags

ambition, goals, injuries, marathon, perseverence, running, training

I think it is unusual for a person to train for a marathon in secret.  There is always that temptation to share an accomplishment (my longest run ever!) or to seek sympathy (look at my bloody socks!), but it is hard to do so without engendering curiosity.  When someone asked me if I was training for a marathon, I was startled, and responded quickly, “My official answer is no.”

And when he replied, “Well, then I’m unofficially cheering for you,” I knew I was dangerously close to letting my “secret” slip.

My family would not approve of marathon running.  They think it is extreme and damaging in the long run** to one’s health.  But I couldn’t help challenging myself to meet that goal.  (Just not at the expense of my ability to run for the rest of my life.)

I trained for eleven weeks before I even downloaded the registration form.  I visited the website often, checking to see that the number of registered runners remained well below the maximum.  If it crept close, I would register immediately, I told myself.

I have trained as surreptitiously as humanly possible.  I think a few close friends suspect, but it was always normal for me to sneak out at random times during the day to run, and if anyone notices that the runs are becoming progressively longer, they don’t comment.  The really long runs are on the weekends anyway, and it is rare for me to see anyone on weekends.

No one notices if I walk with a limp on Sunday after running for three hours on a Saturday.

I am also as cautious as possible in my training.  The last time I started to build my mileage this high, I tore my Achilles tendon, and I am wary of incurring a similar injury.  The threat of injury, in fact, was what kept me delaying my registration, even after I successfully completed an 18 mile run in 2 hours and thirty minutes.  I broke my shoulder the week before the half Ironman last year, after all.  After five months of training.  And there was no refund.

But today I printed off the registration form.  I carried it around for a while in my bag, set it on my desk at work behind some books.  It rested in the dusty dark through my lunch break run.  I pulled it out in the afternoon and filled it out in careful, legible letters.  I studied it for a moment, read the waiver, cringed at the line stating they were free to take photographs of me.

I wrote a check, signed it.  I put everything in an envelope and addressed it.  Now it is sitting next to my computer, waiting to be sealed, stamped, and sent.

I eye my injuries warily, monitoring them to see how well they heal, ready to bail from my “secret” plan, at the first sign of my tendon ripping or a stress fracture forming.

How much pain is normal? I wonder.  I am good at tolerating pain, but I don’t want something to break the week before the race.

I want to finish, and well.

*That is a pun, not a misspelling.

**Ha!  I see what you did there.

Swamped, and March by David Budbill

Tags

cold, David Budbill, icy mud, March, nature, poetry, running, spring, weather

Sorry for the lack of posts lately…I am swamped! 

I went running the other day when it briefly got above freezing, which I thought was heavenly until I realized that the trail was 10 cm of icy mud.  6 miles of trail running with my feet under icy mud is the exact opposite of heavenly.  I’m hanging on gaunt dreams of spring, and speaking the dream before I see the fact.  I <3 this poem.

March

Rain-glaze on snow. Mud and ice and snow.
Coyotes feed themselves on gaunt dreams of spring. Then
what comes slowly suddenly he sees.

Light hovers longer in the southern sky.
Brooks uncover themselves. Alders redden.
Grosbeaks’ beaks turn green. Chickadee finds the song
he lost last November, and blue jay abandons
argument and gluttony. He cranes his neck,
bobs his mitered head; he bounces on a naked branch
crying: Spring!
But, like all winter’s keepers
he speaks his dream before
he sees the fact.
Did you hear a phoebe?
And he out again and walking on the earth,
in the air, in the sun, ankle deep in mud.

- David Budbill

Running commentary

Tags

commentary, humor, life, random, running, silly, strangers, unsolicited advice

In a tribute to those amazing people who tirelessly provide unsolicited advice to complete strangers, I though I would share some of the better comments I have received myself.  (This happens with alarming frequency to me, often when I am running (and especially when I am running barefoot).)

While running:

(from a guy on a bike) “Pretty good, but your right leg kicks out a bit.”

(from a very drunk dude) “Heeeyyyyy, it’s Iron Girl!”

(the most popular comment) “You forgot your shoes!”

“Yeah, barefoot!”

“Keep going!”

(during a massive rainstorm) “Hey!  I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s raining!”

While working in the field:

(as I was climbing over a fence one handed while carrying sampling gear) “You’re a tank!”

From a doctor:

“You have a very high tolerance for pain.”

In very cold weather:

“Are you from Alaska?”

“You are a very hardy person.”

(this is a very popular one) “Aren’t you cold?”

In the locker rooms:

“If you buy a bra one cup size up it is like an extra purse!”

At the grocery store:

(while I was looking at sweet potatoes) “Are those good?”

“How does one melt chocolate?”

 

What kind of unsolicited advice/comments have you received?

Uvita, Costa Rica

Tags

Ballena marine national park, beaches, Costa Rica, photography, running, travel, Uvita

Uvita is just a small town in the rural Osa Peninsula.  I only stayed there one night, but it was beautiful enough that I thought I could share the photos here.

This is the hotel where we stayed. Towels folded like hearts! True luxury after biological stations (which are heaven, of course, even without hot water )

View from the hotel

My students doing a jump photo in Ballena Marine National Park. Very beautiful. The students are nice looking too!

The next morning, I got up super early to go for a run. This was the earliest photo I could take (my camera not being good in low light) because when I tried to take a photo earlier, it ended up like….

This!

Ah, what a running trail!

Ballena Marine National Park.

“We pretend that the beach is a place where you can rest.”

A quiet little town in the morning. Lots of birds!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Standing out in stupidity

Tags

getting lost, kindness of strangers, running, stories, storytelling

I had something else planned for today’s post, but I had quite the adventure last night, so I thought I’d share.  It’s kind of a long story, and I apologize for that in advance.

Yesterday was a pretty typical day in that I arose around 4:30, went for a swim, biked to work, and then headed out to the field to haul water around to my plants.  In the afternoon, I helped an undergraduate with his field work, and we didn’t get back to the lab until late.  Nonetheless, I had a fairly intensive bike/run (called a “brick” in some circles) workout planned for the evening.

I tell you all this because, by the time I headed out on my bike, I had already had a long and fairly physically intensive day.  Workouts after a long field day can be tough, but I just tell myself to stick it out.

I did the bike portion of the workout, short (15 km) and high intensity.  Then I rolled off my bike and started on the run.  I had planned a 24 km run (15 mi), which is not trivial for me, but it was a beautiful evening and I was soon enjoying myself and moving along at a pretty good clip.

As the sun set, the world filled with fire beetles (I am calling them this in the attempt to dissuade people from using the misnomers of “fireflies” or “lightning bugs”, which are both technically incorrect).  As I ran through them, they landed on me all over until I flashed like a beacon.

I was daydreaming and not paying a lot of attention, so I decided to try running down a road I had never been on before.  I had looked at a map beforehand and the road seemed to connect, so I thought I would be alright.

But as I ran down the road, the sky darkened and the fire beetles vanished.  Dark walls of trees rose on both sides.  “Okay,” I thought, “I am still heading west, everything should be alright.”

Soon enough, the road I was running on turned to gravel.  Another half a mile later and the gravel disintegrated into dirt with clumps of grass.  The canopy closed overhead, blocking out the moonlight until it was black as pitch.  I stumbled to a stop, hands out in front of me.

Clearly, I couldn’t continue this way.  I knew I was going west, but in the pitch darkness and without a road, I could easily have gotten turned around in the forest.

So I took a deep breath, turned around, and ran back the way I had come.  Now, I had been running for over 2 hours at this point, and the thought of doubling back all the way was hard for me to swallow, so I decided to use one of my tricks for finding my way around a new place.  I doubled back until I hit the nearest paved intersection, and took a left, heading north.  The road took me up a long, winding road and my heart sank as it continued steadily north, instead of bearing west again.

The problem with running is that it can get you a whole lot of nowhere fast.

At the top of the hill, the road curled in on itself in a cul-de-sac.  I stopped.  Dead end.  The thought of doubling back at this point was nearly unbearable, so when a woman walked by with two barking dogs, I couldn’t help but say, “Excuse me, I’m so sorry to bother you.”

“I’ve been running for three hours; I think I’m lost,” I blurted, trying not to sound desperate, though I was.

I told her about my plight, and although she thought it odd, she was kind.  She offered to give me a ride back to town, and I must admit I did not fight very hard when I said, “No, I couldn’t possibly…” and when she said, “No, I insist!” I gave in rather quickly.

I must have apologized forty times on the drive back.

But here is my moral dilemma.  She took me back to the lab, where I changed, got on my bike and commuted home.  By the time I had showered and gotten into bed it was near midnight.  This morning, I got up at 4:30, went for a swim, and now am about to head out to the field.

Which means that I probably could have run home last night, but I was too lazy.  I feel like a terrible person, that I took advantage of that woman’s kindness and made her go out of her way to help me because I was stupid and lazy.

I wish there was a way I could repay her kindness.

Achilles Heel

Tags

achilles heel, achilles tendon, addicted to running, addiction, biking, comics, doctors, drawings, FoxConn, frustration, healing, injuries, rabies, running, stitches, swimming, withdrawal

It’s been a rough year for me, injury wise.  I’ve always been eager to fling myself into life (i.e. “accident prone”), but the injuries of the past year have been on a more serious scale.

In January, for example, I tore my Achilles tendon.  Well, let me restate that: I ran 19 km (~ 12 mi) on a torn Achilles tendon…when there was 6 cm of snow on the ground (it doesn’t help the healing, actually).  I had convinced myself that it was “just one of those things you run through” and even though my ankle hurt every time it hit the ground, I was listening to an “expose” on the horrible conditions of Chinese workers in Fox Conn factories on NPR’s “This American Life” program.  How could I complain about my ankle when they were suffering so much?  (NB: The narrator, Mike Daisey, turned out to be partly falsifying and exaggerating the situation.)

After running that distance on my injured ankle, I could barely walk.  My friends finally persuaded me to go to the doctor.  He hemmed and hawed and poked at my ankle before declaring a torn Achilles tendon.  I said, “Can I run on it?”

He stared at me for a moment, then said, “I remember you.”  It was only then that I realised that this was the same doctor that had seen me when I had broken my wrist the previous autumn in a bicycle accident.  After he declared my wrist broken, I had said, “Can I swim with it?”  (I still had tears in my eyes from the nurse “positioning” it for an x-ray.  Which is a special kind of pain.)

Now, sitting in his office, I declared huffily, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He narrowed his eyes, pulled out a prescription pad and wrote, in all capital letters, “NO RUNNING.“  Then he underlined it three times and sent me to the physical therapist.  Now that I think of it, this was also the doctor that had to call the CDC for me because I had been bitten by a tropical bat and needed rabies shots.

I sighed and said, “I always have problems with this ankle.”

To which he quipped, “I guess it’s your Achilles heel!”

As it turns out, you can develop a physiological addiction to running.  I had been running more than 80 km (~50 mi) a week at this point, and to go from that to 0 was a shock to my system.  I had all the withdrawal symptoms of a heroin addict: shakes, headaches, chills, cold sweats, mood swings, panic attacks.

To support me in the absence of running, I upped my swimming routine to more than 25 km a week.  The physical therapist started me on an RTR (return to running) program, where you increase the amount you can run from a 30 second segment of 6 five minute intervals to a full 30 minutes.  The RTR program was painfully slow, and my healing was unbearably incremental.  I had finally finished the RTR program and was building up my running mileage again (and biking between 25 and 50 km a day), when…the skateboarder hit me.

The person who stitched me up said, “No swimming!”  And I couldn’t bend it far enough to bike or run.

As I sat in the doctor’s office, waiting to get my stitches out, I reflected on this whole adventure.  When the doctor came in, he said, “Oh no, not you again.”  He poked at my stitches and said, “What did you do to yourself this time?”

When he took the stitches out, it was still gaping (“It looks like a mouth,” he said.  I was not amused.).  He put on Steristrips and forbade me for swimming for another week.

Sigh.

Seems like my left leg is always compensating for my injured right leg. It's gotten disproportionately muscley in the past few months.

Love thyself

Tags

barefoot running, half marathon, Love, running, training, white lipped tree frog

A white-lipped tree frog (Litoria infrafrenata) on Lizard Island.

I took this photo a few years ago on Lizard Island, which is about 80 km (50 mi) off the coast of Cairns, Queensland.  These white-lipped tree frogs were not uncommon, and they didn’t seem to mind being around humans.  My friend had one that lived in her fine china…she liked it because it ate all the pesky insects that flew in to investigate the bright lights in her display case.

This guy.

Doesn’t that frog on the mirror just seem to love himself?  And I was thinking, isn’t that one of the hardest things to learn?  But it is so important!  Sometimes it almost seems that you have to learn to love yourself before you can truly love anyone else.  And what use are you to anyone if you are so preoccupied with hating yourself?  Maybe I’m not the one to be writing about it, since I am a master of self-hate.

I’ve hated just about everything about myself for a long time, and it has sometimes had serious implications for my life and health.  I make mean jokes about my Cyrano de Bergerac-ian nose, my imperfect body, my annoying voice.  I am 165 cm (65 in) tall, but at one point in college I dropped below 43 kg (96 lbs).  It didn’t make me like myself any more.  Looking back, I can see the ways in which my self-hate has kept me from being a good frienddaughtersister.  And the times when I have been most at ease with myself have been the times when I was most absent from myself.

Does that make sense?  There have been moments when I have been on the brink of giving everything away.  I would have given my whole heart to the first person that asked for it, or wanted it.  It was this wild feeling, joy and desperation in a cocktail blend.

But who truly wants your whole heart?  Your complete and utter devotion?

I mean, really.

I make a good wingman, second mate, vice president.  I’m good at taking orders and making things happen.  I love doing things for other people.  But not for myself.

The truth of the matter, though, is that you must love yourself.  No one else is going to do it for you.  You must learn, even though it is hard.

This fall I was suffering from a broken heart.  To cope, I started training intensely for a half marathon.  Similar to other members of my family, I sometimes attend to things with a dogged and driven devotion.  This fall, it was running.  I did everything: speed work, fartleks (“speed play”), hill work, sprints, long runs.  I ran barefoot and shod, in minimalist shoes, on trails and on roads, in the middle of the day and in the middle of the night by the light of the moon.  I ran every day, swam 3 km three times a week, worked in long long bike rides in the mountains.

Tools of the trade, mate.

Now, I’ve done heaps of races: half marathons and sprint triathlons are my favourites.  But I have always said that I would never be faster, that I was simply incapable.  No one in my family is a super star athlete, it is simply not done.  And the “you just can’t”s in my family, though not intended to be discouraging, have been repeated throughout my life.

So, on race day, when I ran this half marathon in 1:42:26 (that’s 4.66 min/km, or 7.5 min/mi), I placed for ladies of my age group.  I beat my last best time by 35 minutes.  Now, that’s not a record breaking time, nor is it especially impressive.  But it was more than I would have ever imagined I could do.  And I had this one, brief moment.  It’s kind of encapsulated by this photo:

It was so brief, but I remember it, and I’m trying to hang onto it.

You don’t have to run a race to love yourself.  You just have to appreciate the miracle of your body every day.  Don’t try to be like anyone else, don’t worry what they think.  You have no control over that!  And what does it matter?  To them you are a blink in the day, their minds are full of their own lives.  You must have your own internal meter of success.

It starts with this: love thyself.

Barefoot running

Tags

barefoot running, Lieberman, running, shoes

I have a confession to make…I love running barefoot.

I love running with shoes, too, don’t get me wrong.  Heck, I’ll even run with those minimalist shoes if I can’t be properly barefoot.  But there is something spectacular about nude soles and asphaltconcretebiketrailsgravelgrass.

This isn’t a barefoot running blog…goodness knows there are enough of those out there these days, what with it being a fad and all.  But I thought I’d post about it anyway because it is part of who I am and what I do.

As a note, I’m not recommending that you run barefoot.  I’m not recommending anything at all, in fact.  I’m just talking into space, as usual.

As another note, I’m going to be talking about feet in this post, so if that bothers you, you may want to navigate elsewhere.  Here’s a nice picture for your time.

I'm still looking for that iconic fall photo...do you like this one?

I’ve been running barefoot for years now.  Back when I lived in Colorado, it was a big thing.  There were barefoot running clubs even back in the early 2000′s.  Probably before that too.  What attracted me to it initially, and probably what remains a major reason, is freedom and independence.  I hate being reliant on things and what is more freeing than to be able to run anywhere, anytime?  Running has never been a sport that required a lot of gear, just a good pair of shoes. 

What if you didn’t even need that?

And then, once you’re barefoot, you learn how to feel through your feet.  There are a lot of nerve endings in your feet.  If you’ve always worn shoes, you can’t imagine the things you have missed.  Every surface has a different texture and feel, smooth or rough, grainy or spikey, bouncy or hard.  Years passed where I ran barefoot for no more reason than that.

When I was in college and running barefoot because I couldn’t afford to replace my shoes often enough, I even heard the “barefoot scientist”, Daniel Lieberman, give a talk.  Only back then he wasn’t talking about running barefoot.  He is an anthropologist, and his talk was all about the mechanics and efficiency of knuckle walking in apes.  It was a good talk!

More recently, they’ve come out with research to show that barefoot running may have less impact on your joints and may help to prevent running injuries.  Here’s a link to the Lieberman webpage, with videos on barefoot versus shod running, if you’re curious.

So that was nice.  It was kind of like a bonus.  You can run barefoot because you love it and also it’s good for you.  Here’s a cookie!

But here’s the problem.  I’m not going to lie to you…I have definitely hurt myself running barefoot.  I have a pretty high pain tolerance, and endorphins can make you immune to some pretty serious injuries.

Glass is no problem.  It mostly lies flat and my feet are, in general, too tough to be cut by glass.  It is those darn acorns.  Once the cars run them over, they are three dimensions of jagged edges.  I once had a broken acorn embedded in the bottom of my foot for the last mile and a half (~2.4 km) of a run.  When I got back, instead of checking my foot, I assumed it had fallen out and went to bed.  It was only three days later, when the pain was becoming intense and hard to ignore, that I checked my foot and found the acorn, still stuck and now infected.  Unperturbed, I cut it out and ran with shoes for a while.

Here’s another thing you probably didn’t want to know…bare feet are more slippery than rubber shoes.  In the rain especially, they slip around a lot more (especially on those white lines they paint on the roads).  One time, after enjoying a barefoot run in the rain, I found that both my soles were covered in big poofy blood blisters.  It felt like I was running on Dr. Scholl’s gel shoe inserts for days. 

Are you gellin’?

I’ve left bloody footprints behind after stretching down from a barefoot run and I’ve come dangerously close to frostbite from running in the winter.

Oh snow!

To be perfectly honest, one should probably wear shoes in the winter, if at all possible.

But here’s another bit of food for thought (should I not mention food in this post?  sorry).  I’ve also hurt myself pretty seriously running with shoes.

I was running with an Iron Man triathlete this summer (goodness knows why he let me tag along, much to my benefit).  I guess I should say I was running “after” him.  I lost seven toenails over the period of three months.  Since then, I’ve been trying to keep up a pretty rigorous schedule (about 160 miles/257 km a month) with speed training (fartleks and all), and I’m missing all but my big toenails.  I’ve just got calluses where the nails used to be.  *sigh*

My feet are worse for the wear right now.  I won’t post any photos, because they are pretty gruesome.  Missing eight toenails, with 14 blisters, three of which are blood blisters (one the size of a silver dollar) and two of which are the size of a credit card, one on each heel.

What’s a girl to do?  I just keep running!  It will resolve itself in time.  Hopefully sooner rather than later.

But I’m curious…do you run barefoot?  Shod?  Do you lose toenails, get blisters?  What’s your policy on barefoot running in the winter?  How do you feel about minimalist shoes?

Some visual relief after all this foot talk.