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watersocks	2010-04-14 10:04 UTC
When I was about 8 or 9 years old, I fell off a cliff in the outer portions of the Palo Duro canyon (I dunno, maybe about here?) View Larger Map and broke my ankle, and it healed back a little wrong, due to being a fracture in a rapidly growing bone. Since then, I've had persistent trouble with putting stress on the ankle - I tried running track in Jr. High School, and aside from other athletically limiting factors, would wind up with a lot of pain in that ankle. Since then I run occassionally - once getting up to around 14-15 miles at a time when I was in my 20's, but usually just 3 or at the most 6 miles. Like many runners, I've been on an endless quest for a running shoe that minimizes pain and fatigue, all the while being mindful of the ankle issue, although thankfully I haven't had any pain I can identify with that break for maybe ten years. I've had my share of foot, ankle, and knee pain that is likely attributable to impact from running and not to my ankle problem. As time goes on, I find myself selecting shoes with more and more substance, offering more "support" and control. My current running shoes are marvels of engineering - I can barely feel the ground underneath my feet, and I suspect the shoes precisely control my stride, and even my posture (one of the shoes doesn't fit just right, but that's probably a fluke manufacturing defect that I should have noticed when I first tried them on). Still, with these shoes and their immediate predecessors, even though the worrying pains are gone, at the end of three miles, I have very tired feet and ankles. Yesterday morning I got a daily-reading email from Delancey Place with an excerpt from a passage noting that 60-80% of runners per year sustain injuries associated with running (many to the knees) and suggesting that running shoes themselves could be the cause of these injuries. The article noted that running shoes have only been around for 5 or 6 decades, and that they cause a very different running stride from what occurs without them. With that in mind, last night I ran around Rice U: View Larger Map (about 2.9 miles around Main/University/Greenbriar/RiceBlvd/Sunset - nice track) wearing "water socks" - I think I paid $7 for the pair - they have a rubbery bottom, but offer no support for the ankles. I was a little scared about what would happen - my stride was, as predicted, very different from usual - more focused on the balls of the feet than on the heels, and I deliberately ran a little slower than usual (I normally run pretty slowly anyway) - I could very much feel the ground and pebbles through the water socks. About halfway through I realized that it wasn't going to be a problem to finish - although my feet were certainly tired - I actually had more energy than when I wear shoes. At the end, I was able to pick up the pace quite bit, and upon finishing noticed that I was substantially less tired overall than I had been when I ran the same track in shoes last week, and that I didn't have any "bad pain" as I had feared. Wow. I did take a precautionary ibuprofen before I went to bed, but now, this morning, although my feet and ankles are slightly stiff from the novel work-out, I've got no pain at all. I guess I would like to try running barefoot, and might still do that, but I'll need to work up to it - I worry about stepping on glass or something like that as well. Maybe moccasins are next, or maybe another cheap pair of water socks, or even just regular socks.
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