Dartmoor Mountain Marathon July 2010

Last weekend I ran the Dartmoor Mountain Marathon, the event that I've been training for since January. Was it all worth it, I can't hear you asking from my desk? Yes it was I would reply if I had heard you. Over Winter and Spring it seemed like the date was never going to arrive and I managed to get enthusiastic and lose motivation in several cycles in the interim. I had planned on following a marathon schedule in training, but having run 17 miles off road barefoot (VFF anyway) several times without problems I didn't bother in the end.

Astonishingly, despite a number of niggles over the first few months of the year, I got to the end of July in the longest unbroken period of training without real injury for ages. I'm not sure if I was just lucky, or whether my crazy new technique of really listening to my body paid off. The tension between getting out for regular training (even when you don't fancy it) and listening when your body says "please lie down now" is a hard one to come to terms with, but I managed it.

I read an article about mega-sessions for body-building (somewhere on the internet, reference later if I can ever find it again). In this article the person in question, apparently a champion bodybuilder, would target a muscle group in one session, blast it in one heavy session and then do nothing more until the following week. The philosophy behind this approach being that strength and tone improvements happen after stress, and in response to it. Repeated stress before full recovery was not thought to help anything other than tiredness (I'm paraphrasing). This seemed intuitively logical and in tune with the 'listen to your body' ethos, so I thought I'd give it a go for my leg strength hill sessions. It seems to have worked really well and I can run clear up near 45% slopes that I had to walk only a few short months ago.

I've also been working on endurance too and this was (and still is) the killer. I could do the 17 mile run in just under 2.5 hours, and could make it back home OK if I took a small bottle of water and a sweetie or two for sugar recharge. I also took to training rides with my local cycle club, however, and they made me feel very mortal and insignificant again. The leg strength training was fine, and I could complete a ride using only the big ring for all but the steepest hills, but after a couple of hours in the saddle with the 'fast intermediate' crew I was totally drained. Eating on the way seemed to make little difference, my legs just emptied and I got used to the 'bonking' sensation and riding in last. Again. I'll just have to keep at it.

It did mean, however, that I hit the DMM pretty sure about my fitness and physical capability. What worried me was my mental capacity to navigate in the moors, on my own, without inadvertently going in the wrong direction. I took about a kilo too much food to ensure that this didn't happen. One of life's lessons - hard exercise suppresses appetite, and carrying too much food in a rucksack is a pain in the shoulders. At least I didn't get lost though and was pretty pleased with most of my navigation choices. Most of my errors were through over-caution, slowing myself down to (needlessly) re-re-re-re-check routes rather than actually allowing myself the freedom to go anywhere in the wrong direction.

All in all the event was brilliant, let down only by straining my left leg trying to run on tussocks on the first day and being generally completely knackered moving over the terrain for four hours longer than any of my longest training runs on Saturday and two hours on Sunday! Note to self, the North Downs are not a great simulation of open moor, but at least I should try running for longer if I want to be able to keep it up! Training specificity bah humbug. I'll do it all again next year though.

Next project, track 5k in mid-August. Got the spikes at lunchtime today. After a week of hurting leg (from the sprain on the tussocks) and generally feeling pretty decrepit and tired, today I feel sharp and perky again. Time for more sports!

Running, retraining and reading

There is surprisingly little published material on barefoot running, and what there is seems to fall into one of two camps - either evolutionary accounts of ability or health/ medical accounts comparing physiological measures of efficiency when in shoes or without. Although these literatures do not appear to come together all that frequently, they do make a compelling case in favour of running without shoes.

To give a couple of examples, in 1999 Dr William A. Rossi published a paper in Podiatry Management entitled "Why shoes make "normal" gait impossible: how flaws in footwear affect this complex human function". In this paper he makes a thorough assessment of exactly how modern heeled shoes (yes, men's shoes too) act to distort the natural posture of the body. A seemingly small difference at the heel actually serves to change not only the foot mechanics but the entire muscular loading on the body trying to keep upright. Not only do you lose sensation and spring at the foot, but you add distortion to your back and/or upper legs trying to keep your balance. Rossi concludes that the only way to retain a natural gait is to return to barefoot walking. The evidence in Rossi's paper also indicates why so many people say that back pains go when they move to barefoot walking or running.

At the anthropological end of the evidence spectrum the most persuasive and prolific writer I have come across is Daniel Lieberman, at Harvard. He has written several papers with Dennis Bramble and others, such as "The Evolution of Marathon Running" (Sports Med 2007: 37(4-5) 288-290) and "The evolution of endurance running and the tyranny of ethnography: a reply to Pickering and Bunn" (Journal of Human Evolution 53 (2007) 434-437). These papers, and many more cited in them, cover the sort of ground that Christopher McDougal sets out in "Born to Run", but in much more detail and mentioning even more evidence.

It is very clear that key parts of the industry are responding to this growing evidence base - the Nike Free is a trainer, still with a built-up heal, but with more flex in the forefoot, and there are lots of other shoes, like the Vibram FiveFinger or Feelmax shoes that have no heal or internal support so that the sole has some protection but the natural foot movement is not otherwise altered. However, these appear to be little more than nods of recognition rather than a full scale shift in the trend of trainer design. Most of the mainstream running magazines are carrying on with featured stablisation and cushioning shoes as if nothing has happened. Looking at the skeptical responses of some online posts about the "dangers of urban running" with razors, glass, needles and ninja dog poo round every corner its a wonder we even go out.

It seems ironic that it is the hardest outdoors running pursuits, in the hardest conditions - fell running and orienteering in the UK, and mountain/trail running in the US and elsewhere, where dedicated shoes (Inov-8, Walsh etc) have narrower and lower heals to avoid the ankle turning that wide heals can lead to. I've even seen reference to Anton Krupicka cutting the heal down on standard trainers for use in trail ultraruns. Full respect - I've set myself a goal of running an ultra this year, but haven't gone much over ten miles in training so far.