Get on the Midfoot!

As a nerdy, uncompetitive child, I didn't understand the allure of sunshine and sweat, but I think I'm getting it now...

Morning Pre-Work Run - Doing the Tighten Up w/VFF Bikilas
3.56 mi.  28 min.:01 sec.  7:52 pace.

Seldom Fidelis

I guess everyone saw this one coming;  that is, everyone except lil' ol' idealistic, romanticizing me.

It'll be different this time, better, and I swear that I won't get hurt this time.  Until I did.  Oh, Saucony Peregrines, I thought you were the answer but you only raised more questions when I began to feel pain in my left iliotibial band, questions like, "I wonder what shoe I'm going to have to try now?"

Here's the answer:

A new pair of Vibram FiveFinger Bikilas.  If they look vaguely familiar, it's because I'd actually had a green-and-white pair last year.  They were my first pair of minimalist running shoes, my inauguration into midfoot striding, and I was delirious about them for the few weeks that I had them, aching soleus muscles and all, until I noticed that the outsole seemed to be peeling away from the upper.  I took them back to the store and asked, "is this normal?"  To which the reply was, "nope," and I received a full refund.  "Okay;  can I get another pair?"  It was then that I learned that Vibram was entirely out of stock and it'd be another eight months before a new shipment came in.  Eight months!?  Glum city!  Shoulders slumped, I left the store, and developed a beautiful long termer with Nike's Free Run+ (more to come on the Nike Free Run line), which are what I wore to run the drizzly 2011 L.A. Marathon.

But as you've noticed over the past few posts, it's been time to find a new pair of shoes, and here're the latest belles of the ball:

All 10 piggies!  The Bikilas are named after Abebe Bikila, an Ethiopian marathoner who ran unshod to gold in the 1960 Rome summer Olympics.  (I'd tried the Vibram TrekSports briefly last fall but discovered that they gave me wicked blisters, which meant they went straight back to REI.)

Frankly, after my dalliance with VFFs last year, I hadn't given serious thought to getting another pair, thinking things like, hey, maybe they were just a gimmick, and besides, my wife is glad that I'm not wearing toe-shoes, but then Vibrams made a cameo in Parks and Recreation as part of Chris Trager's collection, and then after the capture of Osama bin Laden, these pictures came out on the birthdayshoes.com website about Special Forces footwear:

wherein some astute, perhaps footwear-obsessed observer, noted what the SeAL was tiptoeing through the tulips in:

Okay, so maybe you'll be tempted to joke that seeing these toe-shoes made Osama die of laughter, but I somehow think the double-tap bullets to the chest and head were the actual cause of death.

I didn't get the camouflage KSOs shown here, but rather got the Bikilas as Vibram's most running-specific FiveFingers shoes.  The soles on the Bikilas are a whole 2mm thicker, i.e. more padded, than the KSOs, and they have a slightly grippier treading:

I picked them up today at REI (20% anniversary sale!), and even though I should be getting ready to go to Milwaukee tomorrow, couldn't resist taking them for a spin.

I've written before about running in zero-drop shoes, and the Bikilas were familiar territory.  You get the same tap-tap-tap sound from the foot pods, although now that I've had a chance to sample several different kinds of minimalist shoes I have a better sense of what people mean when they say that one style has more cushioning versus another pair, etc.  It's nice to run in zero-drop shoes again, although I can tell where my knees have been weakened a little by running in more padded, built-up trainers, but at least there's no IT band pain.  Unlike the first pair of Bikilas I had last year, which had a totally hot-spot free liner, I noticed a little burning on the lateral midsole of my left foot.  But running down the street in these foot-gloves felt good, my running form tightened up naturally, and even though they may look a little ridiculous, perhaps in the right setting they could look intimidating to, say, a terrorist.

Probably not if I'm wearing them;  they'd probably just laugh at my farmer's tan.

First Run in New Vibram FiveFingers Bikilas

3.55 mi.  28 min.:31 sec.  8:01 pace.

Here We Go Again

My wife asks me to take a marriage compatibility inventory/test that’s in the book she’s reading – why do women find these things so interesting?

We get to the question, “can you name three things that are causes of stress for your spouse?” The first words out of her mouth are, “finding a new running shoe.” Oh – so that’s why women find these things so interesting.

I really wanted to like the New Balance MT101s, I really did. I’d read such glowing reviews about them in all of the trail/ultra/running blogs I frequent, as well as for another, more hidden reason: when I was in high school I had not-so-secret dreams of becoming a rock and roll god, a guitar hero, tight leather pants and big hair optional, but wailing feedback and distorted hammer-taps on the fretboard, multiple issues of “Guitar World” bought with my allowance when other, cooler kids were spending that cash on beer and drugs. A big part of this aspirational streak was the impulse to buy the same gear that my six-string saints slung – limited, of course, by budget – but the same brand, at any rate. I remember browsing the racks of one Guitar Center, dwelling on the Ibanez guitars, the brand that my then-current hero, Joe Satriani, played, when my mentor, who was helping me shop for a new guitar, pulled me aside, out of earshot of the salesman, whispering with no little frustration at my fixation, “hey, dude, why the hard-on for the Ibanez’s?”

Okay. So I wouldn’t call my desire to like the MT101s exactly a hard-on, and I wouldn’t call Tony Krupicka and the Skaggs my pantheon of running idols, but still, I really wanted to like the running shoe they’d had so much input into designing. And as you can guess, I didn’t.

So much seemed to make sense, the shoe’s light weight, lugged outsole, minimalist upper, but these attributes added up, at least for me, a shoe that was good from far, far from good. Perhaps it’s my own weird foot anatomy or something, but this shoe not only gave me some Achilles pain, also made the head of my fifth metatarsal ache, and after the second brief run with these problems I decided enough was enough and returned them to the store from which I’d adopted them.

I then did what a lot of people do when they’re looking for love: I turned to the internet. No, there is no eHarmony for shoes, no match.com for sneakers, but rather, I turned to Skynet with the hope that the wisdom of the running masses could crowdsource me some ideas for a trail-running shoe.

Which brought me to the Saucony Peregrine:

The Runner’s World Editor’s Choice award recipient for trail shoes, it’s a trail-running version of their wildly popular Kinvara, which is even more minimalizzle (meaning less actual minimalist) than the NB MT101, but has sold extremely well as a transition-to-minimalism shoe.

I’d shied away from the Kinvaras, because they just seemed like a lot more shoe than I had wanted as an aspiring minimalist, which you can see on this profile of the Peregrines:

Although they’re still light, particularly compared to most trail shoes, they feel oddly substantial, particularly if your benchmark is a minimalist shoe (not to mention your bare feet).

These things are definitely “Shoes”, capital S, and the Satriani-worshipping part of me that wanted to run like a Tarahumaru revolted against these things.

The toe box is, relative to many minimal shoes, fairly constrictive and more like a standard running shoe.  The outsole lugs are pretty impressive:

On the one hand, wearing these (relative for minimalist) burly shoes, as compared to a minimalist zero-drop model, makes you feel like you’re walking on pillows six inches off the ground, which runs contrary to the minimalist/Satriani ideal.  On the other hand, the heel-to-toe drop of the Peregrines is a much-more-minimalist-felicitous 4mm, compared to the near centimeter drop of the MT101s.

They ain’t pretty but they look like they’d git ‘er done.  For some reason, perhaps the lower heel-toe drop, they make me fast;  I can keep up with a mid-8 pace with surprising ease and lack of effort.  Maybe it’s the placebo effect of those chunky lugs, but I could run in them with a surprising speed.   One observation that’s been shared around on the interwebs is that the outsoles are surprisingly grippy, and I’d have to agree.  Perhaps it’s little more than the placebo effect, but even doing nothing as exciting as walking across the parking lot to the gym, I noticed a surprising degree of traction with these shoes, even just on the concrete walking from the car to the gym.

“What do you think of these?” I ask my wife.  “Oh, they look nice – they look like normal shoes.”  I know what stresses my wife out right now:  the thought that I might buy another pair of toe-shoes.