A while ago I posted a couple of articles on barefoot running. This was at the height of the minimalist craze, when runners of all types looked to minimalist shoes as a miracle cure for their running issues. At the time, there was no empirical evidence that barefoot running reduced injury rates.

Well, it looks like the science is finally here. A study published in January’s Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise gives substance to the long-unsubstantiated claim. It ends with the conclusion that runners landing on their forefeet (as is encouraged by minimalist footwear) are less injury prone. More precisely, they suffer half (!) the amount of stress injuries. A quick, fair synopsis of the article can be found here.

So should you go out and buy a pair of FiveFingers? Not necessarily. It still takes patience and commitment to safely adjust to barefoot-style running. But this study provides, for the first time ever, real evidence that your efforts will be rewarded.

The Ragnar Relay is almost upon us, and I am… apprehensive.

Less than two weeks after the Trails4Tails ultra, I’m embarking on another adventure. Don’t get me wrong– I’m all for adventures. I just need longer to recover afterward.

Of particular concern is my IT band. The last time I tried running on it, it was painful and stiff after 3 miles– well short of the 5-9 mile legs I’ll be doing as part of my relay team.

But I’m not hopeless. My last run was three days ago. Six days ago I couldn’t walk without a limp, let alone run. If I’ve been healing at the same rate over these last three days, running my legs should be feasible.

Right? Perhaps borderline-feasible?

On Saturday, I finished the hardest run of my life.

I thought I had Trails4Tails in the bag. After all, I had done a 50-miler last summer, and that had been okay. It hurt—don’t get me wrong—but the first 35 miles of The Lone Ranger Ultra had been effortless. So how hard could a 40 miler be?

Pretty hard, as it turns out. Here’s my breakdown, lap-by-lap.

Lap 1 (miles 1-8)

I wanted to use my first lap to learn the course—but I wasn’t going to take the walking tour. So I went out with the top few runners. These guys were veteran trailblazers, and I must have stood out from the pack, clambering as I was over roots.

The trail led us to a slick wooden bridge and, following the other runners’ lead, I hopped diagonally onto it. My worn-out road shoes (another distinguishing feature) barely touched the surface before swinging into the air again, somewhere over my shoulders.

My fall banged me up a bit, but what’s remarkable is the reaction of the other runners, each of the top three racers stopped to make sure I was okay.

Lap 2 (miles 9-16)

I don’t remember much of this lap. There was a pain in my calf, which had started with my fall on the bridge and seemed to get worse with each mile. The knee on the same leg, which seems to have an aversion to ultras, also began bugging me. My body, used to road runs, was not adapting well to the trail.

Lap 3 (miles 17-24)

My knee was bad enough at this point to change my form. I know how foolish it is to favor one leg for over 20 miles, but the alternative was a DNF. Hence, when the inevitable happened and I tweaked the Hamstring on my other leg, there was no surprise mixed with my chagrin.

Lap 4 (miles 25-32)

This was the most frustrating lap. I was barely out of breath, but the fear of injury kept me from moving faster. My left hamstring was bulging oddly; it felt like a pain-filled brick had been planted behind my knee. My right knee had gotten better, but lifting it made my groin spasm. I seemed to kick every root, and each instance was punctuated with an embarrassing, womanly gasp.

Lap 5 (miles 32-40)

Now I was hobbling. The other runners had reappeared; some blew by, but most walked and cheered me on as I crawled past. I did some walking myself on this lap; a 30-meter downhill which, stiff-legged as I was, threatened to take me out of the race if I ran it.

Out of the 18 people who did the full race, I finished 7th. I’m humbled, but pleased; just getting to the finish line was hard enough for me.

For the past five weeks, I’ve been working at a day camp for kids. Part of my job calls for councilor meetings every Friday, where we play games and conference/complain about the week we’ve had.

At yesterday’s meeting, we were playing a game that should be familiar to most readers, called Run the Bases. The game is simple enough; basically, two people throw a ball to each other over a particular stretch of land. An unsuitable large number of their friends (in this case about thirty councilors) try to run between them. Either of the ball passers may decide, at any moment, that they would rather hurl the ball at a friend– at which point said friend gets beaned. It’s a game that provided me hours of entertainment as a child.

Running being one of my few skills, I decided that I was invincible. At one point, I found myself making a close turn around one of these ball catchers just as he caught the ball. Determined not to get hit, I took off at a dead sprint. My eyes, however, were still locked on his hateful hand, clenched around the tennis ball. I turned my head forward just in time to see the horror on a fellow councilor’s face as he hurtled at me.

We had the cartoonish kind of collision with our chests together and our arms held out behind each other. In the moments before we hit the grass, it must have looked like we were about to hug.

And now, the relevance of this story: I must have turned my knee outward right before the collision, because my fellow councilor/ball-dodger managed to hit the side of it just right with his own. Both of my knees were pretty banged up after the ultra, and even after two weeks of healing, this hit was enough to renew some of that damage.

It’s certainly not catastrophic, and it came at a time when I don’t have to run lots of miles. In fact, I could only laugh about it afterward. After running 50 miles on asphalt, this is how I get hurt.

I hate treadmills. Hate ‘em. If I could, I would never use them– but this is sadly unfeasible. It seems like situations will always arise that send us indoors to that inexhaustible manufacturer of monotony.

Nothing drove that fact home more than the two feet of snow that blankets Bethlehem. The streets are icy and the roads buried beneath snow. All in all, it’d make for a dangerous, fruitless run outside. I knew what a responsible runner would do. My long run of the week would take place indoors.

So this responsible runner ran 12.5 miles on a treadmill, nonstop. My iPod won’t stay in my sweaty ears, and the TV didn’t seem to be working. It was miserable.

On the plus side, I’m injury free and I can actually offer you loyal readers some mile splits. I haven’t been able to keep track of my pace since my Forerunner drowned in a sea of sweat, so this is quite exciting for me. Anyway, here goes:

Miles 1-4: 6:40 Pace.
Miles 5-12.5: 6:18 Pace.

It was a grueling training session, between the boredom and the unusual intensity (you’d think that they’d conflict, but no—it’s a double whammy). I had decided that I needed a reward by the time I hit 12.5 of my 13 mile workout.

That is why I was seen yesterday afternoon, sprinting a half-mile around campus, wearing nothing but my running shorts and shoes. A wholly-earned victory lap in the snow. Because, dammit, being a responsible runner only gets you so far.