Finger Feet!

Finished my first week of run/walk with my Vibram Five Fingers.
I could kiss the ground with joy that I haven't had any recurrence of my pulled calf muscle.
My running style has had to change competely in order to run without smacking my heel on the floor. My turnover is quicker and I've noticed that I'm running slightly faster than I used to but this may be because of the fact that I'm only running for 30 seconds at a time. This could change as the running section of the training becomes longer, I'll have to wait a few weeks to find out.
After running in the Bikilas my feet feel like they've been stretched and massaged, especially on the balls of my feet. I guess this is due to the muscles and tendons in my feet becoming used to working more than they were previously in my running shoes. My calf muscle is holding up well. I've not felt any twinge at all which is promising since every time I've previously tried to start running since pulling my calf muscle I've only managed a couple of hundred yards before I had to turn around and perform the sad walk home thinking that my running days were over.
On a slightly more depressing point I've stood on the weighing scales for the first time in four months! Hoping against hope I thought I had somehow managed to maintain my racing weight of 12 stone 9lbs (177lbs for American readers or 81kg for those who deal in metric) even though I hadn't changed my eating habits one bit. Nature has a way of dealing with people like this and the scales showed that I had managed to put on exactly one stone (14lbs or 6kg)!! This works out at about 1lb of weight for each week I wasn't running. Since it takes an extra 3500 calories to gain 1lb of weight this works out as an extra 500 calories per day which would pretty much have been negated by the running that I should have been doing. The pulled calf muscle strikes again!
Anyway, here's a photo of my Vibram Five Fingers Bikilas. They do look odd and feel odd and certainly draw attention from passers-by but if they improve my running and reduce my injuries then they can look as odd as they want.


Here's my third and final run of the week. This was done in Chester which is my girlfriend's home town. There's some great routes around here, taking in the old city as well as the canals and country lanes surrounding it. For this run I just went up the nearby canal and back down the road because my schedule doesn't currently allow me to go further afield.



Next week I will be upping my run/walk to 1 minute running and 4 minutes walking!