Given that my route was going to take me along the dried river bed that forms part of the Diktamos Gorge, the Vibrams were never going to be an entirely sensible choice. Still, if I’m going to do a crazy run in the 42 degree blazing sun just to fetch breakfast I may as well go the whole hog.

I was quick to regret my shoe choice. I had to run most of the 4km route with a large pebble sized, hollow, impression in my right heel but at least it encouraged me to run up on my toes.

When I arrived at the village I slowed down to a nonchalant saunter hoping I could cool off and not look like a crazy dying thing in front if the locals. The air in the little shop was furnace like. I stepped in and immediately a gallon of sweat made it’s escape from my body. My hands were dripping as I selected the tomatoes.

After the tomatoes my purchases went downhill a bit. I was scavenging for breakfast but couldn’t find eggs, yoghurt or cheese.  In the end I came back with the heaviest products on offer – home made honey, a bag of flour and a bottle of dubious looking brown liquid.

I’m hoping it’s the famed Cretan wine and not some DIY plant fertiliser. I’ll have to wait til lunchtime to find out.

Now to bake some honey bread…..

A beautiful pair of Vibram Five Fingers arrived just before the camping expedition.

Unfortunately all the photos were taken post camping trip where of course it rained relentlessly and so the Five Fingers have lost a little of their new shoe gleam.

I wanted to get a slightly larger pair of VFF’s as my earlier pair of Vibram Five Finger Sprint were pulling a little bit on my longer toes. I opted for the Vibram Five Finger Speed because they are cool and yet also the most normal style in the range. I’m not necessarily attracted to normal but I was hoping to get them past the family’s acceptability rules so I can actually wear them in public and outside the confines of nightfall.

It seemed to work as no one complained when I packed them for the camp and I even managed to sneak in a shopping trip to the local Lidl while wearing them.

The Vibram Five Finger Speed were remarkably easy to put on, a push and a wiggle was all that was required to engage the toes in the right place. Perhaps that’s the result of finding a pair that actually fits.

I did a lot of scrabbling around the camp while wearing these and my little toe did occasionally pop out of its little recess while I was squatting down trying to light the Kelly Kettle. They were perfect for running though, extremely comfortable and no pressure points at all.

The soles are a bit more built up than the more minimal models. The VFF Speed has additional toe and heel pads just like the Bikila Five Finger and by the looks of it the new Vibram range seems to have maintained the trend for extra pads. 

Not all barefoot or minimalist runners will like this. It increases the weight of the shoe slightly and of course all the additional padding will reduce the feedback between the floor and the foot. In these particular conditions – rubble and thorn strewn trails, I was grateful for the slight reduction in floor feedback.

I’ve read somewhere that the Speed model uses the same sole unit as the Bikila but they don’t have the additional 3mm insole and so have slightly more ground feel.

And so for the run.

Having spent 2 soggy wet days entertaining kids on a camp site, I was well and truly in need of a run. Lynn and I set off after clambering over the rickety style that marked the escape route from camp.

Generally my breathing is up the spout for the first 3 minutes of any run and then gradually eases off until I can manage a converstaion by the 20 minute point.

This run was tougher than usual, I felt as though I had a bit of kick in me and kept pushing along keeping pace with Lynn. I was closer to my 5k race pace which is sufficiently fast (in my books) to ensure that I never catch my breath.

The Vibram shoes were so comfortable. I’d spent the most of the trip wearing my Soft Star RunAmocs which are an incredibly practical shoe for this sort of trip but I felt pain when wandering over the rubble paths. In contrast the Vibram Speeds left me feeling positively sprightly.

It was a joy to feel so light footed and yet protected, these have easily moved into my favourite shoe territory and even the kids thought they were cool.

I had a Wandle Trail run penciled in for today.

I would have very much liked to rub that plan out considering I’ve barely recovered from last weekends 10 mile hair cut run but dedicated half marathoners can’t relax on long slow run day.

You won’t know anything about that 10 mile haircut run as I’ve been too idle to blog about it but basically I went to get my hair cut at my old local, ran home along the Capital Ring, it rained heavily, it was a long way and it hurt, a lot. There it’s blogged.

Today’s challenge was to find the start of the Wandle Trail and run along it until I found a Rose and Crown pub where I could sit and phone for a recovery vehicle. I also wanted to try out and review the new offering from Adidas miCoach – the Adidas miCoach mobile, a free GPS powered app for the iPhone.

I’ve already tried the Adidas miCoach Pacer and was really impressed with the gadget and the associated website with its highly sophisticated training plans. It’s the training plans that set this gadget apart from the competition such as Garmin and Nike+ and the great thing about the miCoach mobile is that it piggy backs all this existing technology.

So you download the free app from iTunes, and link it to your Adidas miCoach account. If you haven’t got one of those yet then go online and get one – it’s free. There’s a little bit of set up to work through and you then get to select your training plan and coaching method. The coaching method is either heart rate based or pace based, I have both options as I have the mobile app and the pacer gadget but mobile only users can only use the pace option.

Back to the iPhone. Having set up your online account and chosen your training plan you can connect to your account via the app and then sync. All of your scheduled workouts will be available along with any custom workouts you’ve set up.

Ideally you would start with an assessment run that will enable the system to accurately assign your pace ranges to the 4 coloured zones used by the miCoach. I’ve found that the assessment is most accurate if you can attempt it on a treadmill, mainly because it is so hilly in my location that its hard to organise a gradual progression in effort. You can also set your pace zones manually which is the option I went for.

The training plans are brilliant but the race related plans aren’t quite geared up for the slow pokes like me. I initially opted for the “Run a Race – 1/2 Marathon Plan” but the longest run never got beyond 90mins which would only just got me over the 6 mile mark. I fiddled the system by selecting the Full Marathon plan and then jiggling the schedule around in the calendar (all carried out online). This has proved perfect for me and today’s run neatly fitted in with the 2:45 scheduled workout.

Having selected the workout you then get to fine tune the coaching environment.

I selected the voice coaching to be Instructional, which is the minimal option, only guiding me into the appropriate zone at the start of each section. The Full option would alert me every time the pace fell outside the desired zone and as it says in the guide this isn’t recommended in built up areas where the GPS accuracy can be a bit patchy.

If you want to listen to your iPod while running you have to select a playlist. I was initially disappointed by this as I like to listen to audiobooks and it didn’t seem to want to let me choose one of these. Then I discovered that you can now create your own playlists directly though the iPod app – this has probably been allowed for ages but I’d never noticed and yet it had always been high on my wishlist. Anyway I digress. Point is, I set up a new playlist with my chosen book – in this case the last hour of The Whole Day Through by Patrick Gale and then the start of The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

So, I found the start of the Wandle Trail, actually the end of the River Wandle at the point it meets the Thames, and pressed go on the Adidas miCoach mobile app and the Garmin Forerunner 310XT. The next 3 miles were fairly uninspiring as I wiggled across fairly built up streets, zigzagging across the Wandle but rarely along it.

The miCoach mobile performed well and matched the Forerunner fairly closely but all that stopped when we reached Colliers Wood and the route started along the river proper. Here the tree cover became dappled and then dense. The miCoach lady got a bit wobbly and started informing me of my km splits every 4 minutes or so. The Forerunner stuck to the truth – a regular but pitiful 8:30 min/km pace.

So unfortunately that miCoach mobile proved to be somewhat inaccurate for me. By the time I reached the fabled Rose & Crown 2hrs 18 mins later the Forerunner read 14.79km while the miCoach suggested I’d run a whopping 18.48km. I’m not going to hold this against the app though. It must surely be a feature of the less robust GPS gadgetry of the iPhone and maybe wouldn’t be a problem for people who run in less built up or covered areas.

Did I mention that miCoach mobile is free? I think it’s a remarkable offering from Adidas, they’ve taken a very accomplished gadget/website combination and done away with the need to buy the £100+ gadget (ie the miCoach Pacer). Generous or nuts?

Either way it’s a winner and I highly recommend it.

I’m taking the direct skin on tarmac approach very slowly but after managing a 300m true barefoot dash last week I thought it was time to go out again.

I don’t recommend late night, barefoot runs on rainy nights. For one thing the gravel sticks more persistently but more importantly the damp attracts soft squishy critters with hard shells and the darkness means you can’t see them.

You can feel them squelching between your toes though.

I ridded myself of the slime after 330m and put the mocassins back on for the remaining 2 miles.

I was using Lynn as my sacrificial canary, she was running far ahead but everytime she wailed and started hopping from foot to foot I knew to make ever such a slight detour.

Not that it worked very well, we hopped and squealed almost evenly.

So marked the start of our true barefoot experience.

I’ve been trying out the minimal footwear such as Vibram Five Fingers and Soft Star RunAmoc for a few weeks but yesterday I was inspired to try running completely unshod. I had been listening to the rather excellent Living Barefoot Podcast which featured an interview with Michael Sandler. Michael is a hugely enthusiastic barefoot runner with a fantastic story to tell. I’ve heard other barefoot officianados’ say that you should really start barefoot before transitioning to a minimal shoe but that just sounded counter intuitive to me. Michael spoke at length in the interview and was incredibly infectious, so much so that today I managed to persuade Lynn to venture out of the door with me clutching our shoes in our hands.

We ran tentatively but were definitely up on our toes. With gritty tarmac roads for our debut attempt we wanted to ensure that our feet had only the tiniest contact with the ground. I was the slowest to become accustomed to the feeling but I developed a rhythm of two steps followed by a medial swipe down my inside leg – to dislodge embedded gravel.

We made it 300m before deciding enough was enough and we finished the rest of the mile – me in my RunAmocs and Lynn in my Nike Frees.

I was offered a pair of Merrell Siren shoes to try out recently. They are a far cry from my recent spate of minimal running shoes but as I had a planned expedition to the Peak District I thought they’d be ideal for a few rough walks.

I’ve worked my way through many pairs of Merrell women’s shoes in the past, they look great and feel extremely comfortable but I’ve always felt let down by the soles which have proved to be very slippy on wet rock and pavement. These Siren shoes have very sturdy Vibram soles so I was hopeful that things might have improved in the intervening decade or so and with a lining of Merrell Gore-Tex they are clearly designed to be worn in all weathers.

We were in the Peaks for my birthday so my folks joined us for our first walk. We’d picked accommodation by the highest pub in Derbyshire which was fine when it came to drinking real ale with a view but became a bit hairy when we tried to descend the valley through a jungle of Gorse.

After 429 metres of moaning we abandoned the descent, got back in the car and headed off to Grindleford for the obligatory chip butty and a walk up and around the Longshaw Estate.

This is one of my favourite walks around the Peak District and it isn’t all about the chip butty.

It’s a steep climb up through the woods with a stream cutting through the valley to the right. When you reach the Estate the fields there are always teeming with an amazing variety of fungi.

The most exciting point of the weekend came when we spotted a clump of Stinkhorns. At least I thought so, the others appeared somewhat less impressed.

The Merrel Siren shoes held up extremely well but then they are so sturdy it is only to be expected. They were fairly clumpy for day to day pavement walking but on the trails they offered a degree of confidence that you only usually experience with a good walking boot.

When I think of ways to describe them I come up with words like, solid, dependable, secure. I really felt as though I could bound along the trail oblivious to the conditions underfoot and the shoes would get me through. The protective toe area was much appreciated in the rocky conditions.

The Merrell Siren shoes are an excellent alternative to the full walking boot. They are solid yet light enough to walk in for hours and provided you don’t get them submerged above the ankle line they’ll remain dry.

It started raining with a vengeance when we’d cleared the cover of the woods, so I got to try out the performance of the Vibram soles on the wet rock.

I didn’t end up on my arse once!

Through dry rock, wet rock and mud the Merrel Siren shoes didn’t let me down.

The RunAmoc shoes from Soft Star arrived just as we were setting off for our weekend adventure in the Peak District. I whipped off my Nike Frees and socks, slung them into the back of the car and slipped on the moccasins instead.

Apart from a brief interlude where I had to review some hiking shoes, the RunAmocs became a bit of a permanent feature – much to Lynn’s disappointment – I’m not sure she approves of my new obsession and it’s associated crusty geography teacher fashion accessories.

My initial thought on the sizing was that perhaps they were too big. There was a very big gap, lets say an inch, between my big toe and the end of the shoe but I’d measured my foot according to the guidelines on the website so decided to try them out. Despite having loads of room in the toe area they didn’t slosh around my foot and felt generally very comfortable.

It’s normally my toes that suffer the most in standard shoes so it was quite a blessing to leave them feeling so free. The roomy toe box creates an obvious point of difference between the feeling of running in the RunAmoc vs the Vibram Five Fingers. Although there is a huge degree of movement available with the Five Fingers, I still feel constrained by the toe compartments while the RunAmocs left me feeling as though I had only a very light drape across the top of my foot.

I ordered the RunAmoc with the slightly thicker sole. At 5mm it is not huge but it is designed to give maximal protection for trail running while still enabling you to feel in-touch with the ground surface.

On Sunday we were running along the Manifold River in Ilam and the tracks varied between limestone paths and root laden trail runs. I was grateful for the protection and managed to run amongst the pebbles without too many exclamations of pain. These soles are thicker than on my Vibram Sprint Five Fingers and were noticeably more comfortable on the rougher surface but I didn’t lose any of the barefoot feel.

As I was running up the limestone steps built into the side of the valley I was aware of my feet bending and hugging the surface. It was a huge contrast to the previous days hike in the solid Merrel Walking Shoes.

Barefoot or minimal running can become almost a spiritual experience where you begin to feel part of the landscape and the track you are running along. It’s a much more involved and gentle way to interact with the trail.

All this barefoot running is reminding me of a trip to Vienna.

At Kunsthauswein I tuned in to the amazing architecture of Hundertwasser and tried to scribble down his writings on the uneven floor.

It seems that Hundertwasser may have been an early adopter of the barfoot movement, this photo shows him wearing a pair of his handmade shoes (summer & winter) - very minimal.

The Uneven Floor

The flat floor is an invention of the architects. It fits engines – not human beings.

People not only have eyes to enjoy the beauty they see and ears to hear melodies and noses to smell nice scents. People also have a sense of touch in their hands and feet.

If modern man is forced to walk on flat asphalt and concrete floors as they were planned thoughtlessly in designers’ offices, estranged from man’s age-old relationship and contact to earth, a crucial part of man withers and dies. This has catastrophic consequences for the soul, the equilibrium, the well being and the health of man. Man forgets how to experience things and becomes emotionally ill.

An uneven and animated floor is the recovery of man’s mental equilibrium, of the dignity of man which has been violated in our levelling, unnatural and hostile urban grid system.

The uneven floor becomes a symphony, a melody for the feet and brings back natural vibrations to man. Architecture should elevate and not subdue man. It is good to walk on uneven floors and regain our human balance.

Hundertwasser, April, 1991

I have to buy my own t-shirts now that my race entries have slumped to next to zero per year.

I first became aware of the existence of bamboo clothing when The Royal Parks Half issued their first race t-shirt. What a fantastic fabric – it’s incredibly soft and has amazing anti-pong qualities.

I ordered this lovely green number – the bamboo Eko from Rapanui clothing after the marketing guy there alerted me to enviromental merits of the company. It is a beautifully soft t-shirt and embroidered with a leaf motif.

It has rapidly become my fave item of clothing and has been worn rather more than is decent.

After two 5k runs and four 18km cycle commutes, I decided it was time to send it to the wash basket - more out of a fear of my work colleagues thinking I had personal hygiene issues than any actual cleaning requirements. Bamboo really does seem to have impressive anti-smell properties.

The Bamboo Eko is quoted as being Rapanui’s most breathable t-shirt but I wouldn’t really recommend it as true performance wear. The weave is too tight and although it is a light t-shirt the sweat soaks in and lingers for just a little bit longer than I appreciate. Cycling seems to be ok as the breeze helps the drying process but I come back a bit damp after a run.

I hope they expand the range though and consider making performance sports gear for runners.

One of the eco features of Rapanui is the so called Traceability Tool, which enables users to trace the entire journey of any garment on our site from seed to shelf.

Seems like my t-shirt fabric was made in Turkey and assembled in their fair wear wind powered factory in the Isle of Wight.

Do they grow Bamboo in Turkey or am I missing a stage in the trace?

Here’s an excellent video from Terra Plana showing the speed with which you can transition from heel strike to forefoot running just by going barefoot. In the video, Barefoot Ralph is taken through his paces by Lee Saxby who runs masterclasses in the Pose technique.

I heard about the video after listening to the interview with Christopher McDougall on the Living Barefoot podcast.

Learning the Skill of Barefoot Running from Terra Plana on Vimeo.

Somewhere along the line I seem to have developed a shoe fetish. I started off in life with a classic shoe phobia and made it into adulthood with a pair of red wellies and a work shoe.

An interest in sport increased my repertoire but even then I managed to live in a pair of Specialized Sonoma cycling shoes throughout my student days.

I blame running.

It must have ticked disturbing boxes in my psyche. I have now commandeered the shoe rack that spans the length of our hall and still have an overspill. I still only have one pair of work shoes but there is a tremendous glut of running shoes and my stockpile is set to increase.

Hiking shoes arrived last week, Nike Free 3.0 trainers yesterday, I’m awaiting stock of a pair of Vibram Five Finger Bikilas and my Soft Star Run Amoc moccasins are slowly winging their way across the Atlantic as we speak. We have a romantic weekend booked away and my only packing demand after spare pants was a selection of running shoes. I may have to hunt out an appropriate 12 step program when we get back.

In the mean time, here are my thoughts on the Nike Free 3.0

I’ve pinned a lot of hopes on minimal running shoes and expect them to revolutionise my mornings and long runs by removing the crippling pains of plantar fasciitis. With this in mind I’ve been diligently introducing Vibram Five Finger runs in to my schedule but reverting to my standard shoe for long runs.

My standard shoe is a heavy duty, cushioned, supported, mega structure so I started looking around for a suitable transition shoe. RunBlogger provided me with some much appreciated advice and Donald from Running and Rambling has written an excellent overview of the options.

Hence the arrival of the Nike Free 3.0

It’s not a truly barefoot experience or even an almost-barefoot-best-described-as-minimal experience but its half way there and a half-way house was just what I needed.

The shoe is incredibly flexible, in fact you want to pick it up and mould it like playdoh. It has a peculiarly innovative sole, made up of little cubes of rubber that enable it to flex freely, this way and that.

We were at Waterloo Station last night picking up one of the kids of Railway Children fame. We were waiting patiently on the platform when I leapt up onto my toes and declared: “Tadaaaa….bet you can’t do that!”

Well it seems they all could but I maintain that it means something that I was the only one who felt suitably empowered by my footwear to display such idiocy in public.

These are flexible shoes.

The uppers are fairly minimal, a little padding around the ankle but in the main these are made of a lightweight waffle fabric. I’m used to shoes with rigid plates in the heel and all this floppiness comes as a bit of a shock. It makes for an incredibly comfortable shoe though. Regardless of your views of Nike and the position of the Free 3.0 on the barefoot-standard shoe scale, you can’t deny that the word on the block is “comfort”.

We went for quick midnight run when we got back from the station and it was such a joy. It was only a short one so I need to test this further with a weekend long run but the first impressions were great. No pain from my feet at all. When I wear standard shoes I get the impression that my second toe nail is being ripped from its bed but there was no discomfort at all with the Nike Free 3.0

The run was silent and fast – at least by my standards. The sole felt as though it had a strange stickiness to it but it didn’t seem to hold me back as we knocked a minute off our usual mile pace.

I think I might have found my half marathon shoe.