Running Motivation: new shoes

Lately I have become interested in running motivation.  I am launching a running motivation app next week, and I thought I would give my readers a little taste of the process that brought me to design and build the new site.

Running is one of the best exercises. There are several that really compete for the throne of “best thing to do for your health” and IMHO it always comes down to a toss up between “control your diet” and “become a runner”. I love to eat. Never met a dessert I did not like. Never stumbled across a second helping that I was not a fan of. I have tried things to control my diet, but it just goes against my grain. In fact, I am going to make myself a PB&J right now…. O.K no bread… having frozen pizza leftovers instead. You get my meaning.

As I was saying. Diet control is just not what I feel like working on right now. I have worked on it in the past, I will work on it again, but for the last several months, running has been my obsession.

So I decided to think very carefully about how I could motivate myself to run. I started to examine, carefully, what stopped me from running each day. Eventually I realized that putting on my shoes was a pretty significant barrier. I am often wearing what would amount to “fitness clothes”, as a side effect of working from home. The only difference from my typical “work from home” outfit and my “I am running now” outfit was my shoes. Working = sandals, Running = running shoes.

So I decided to try Vibram Five Fingers, which is very popular with the Quantified Self community. The basis idea of the shoes is that they change your stride from heel-toe to toe-heel. And they did change how I run. But that was not actually the reason I got them. I got them so that I could feel really awesome and cool when putting on my running shoes. I was trying to daily hangup that was keeping me from running.

Interestingly the Vibram Five fingers have also helped with another project of mine, to become more mindful. I realized that normal shoes were isolating me from any experience of the ground. Normal shoes ensure that I experience grass, or mud, or dirt or concrete or asphalt in all the same way. All I “feel” is the bottom of my shoe, which is always the same, which means that I can effectively disconnect mentally from my environment, at least as far as experiencing the ground goes.

Using the Vibram Five Fingers, I feel just about everything, but I am somewhat protected from the damage that random pebbles and twigs might otherwise do to my feet.

Mindfulness is all about being in your own body rather than in your own head. Experiencing what is around you and being in the moment, rather than giving in to your internal thought monologue. It is extraordinarily difficult for me to be mindful, even a little, but the shoes actually help. They remind me that I am stepping on something, and that this is connected to where I am right now. Generally that pulls me in a mindful direction. I have started going without shoes all together to enhance this effect. It helps.

I wish that I could end this article with a resounding endorsement of Vibram’s product, and if I had “standard issue” feet, that is exactly what I would do. Unfortunately I do not have standard size feet. I have really long and narrow feet. Vibram’s design presumes that my toes should be much wider than they really are and as a result of this my big toe pulls outside of the protection of the rubber sole. This is much easier to show then describe:

You can see how my toe actually pulls to the right of the rubber that is intended to protect the toe.

Eventually, this happens..

As you can see, I have been running on the cloth rather than the rubber because my too thin toes pull out of the rubber protection. I said “rubber protection”… (ha).

So the Vibrams are awesome… unless you have thin feet. I am looking for a “barefoot running” shoe that does not have toe slots as a replacement. Still I like my Vibrams and I am glad I got them.

The real upside is that this running motivation hack, get shoes you think are cool, actually did work for me. My running went up substantially as a result! For most people, these shoes will work just fine!

-FT