why this blog

"Why this blog" seems like a reasonable place to start. To answer, I need to scroll back a few weeks, to the Canton Fall Classic 10k in late October. The short story about that race: it was good; I PR'd by a lot and was pretty happy with my time. But when I finished, I had discovered a wholly new pain in my left knee, this time on the outside--a weird, dull, disconcerting kind of pain that made itself known whenever I bent my leg. This was super-frustrating after having spent the last several months getting over a nagging pain on the inside of that same knee, it felt like I was right back where I started. I wasn't even running in racing flats, but my trainers: asics Kayanos with not all that many miles on them. I ran a short 30 minutes the next day and the pain was still there. I took the next four days completely off, then did my long run of 10 miles the next saturday. Within a mile, the pain showed up like an unwelcome guest.

This ushered in a period of experimentation. I read up on minimalist/barefoot running and some of the ideas took hold. It occurred to me I didn't need to be a sports medicine doctor to explain why a toe-strike in bare feet would transmit less force to the knee than a heel-strike in expensive running shoes (in the former, the force is absorbed over centimeters as the heel travels downwards, but in the latter case, there are only the few millimeters of compressing foam). And if you always ran on the balls of your feet, as many runners advise, then what exactly is that exquisitely engineered heel strike zone in your running shoe doing for you?

I read Chris McDougall's book "Born to Run", and one line in particular stuck with me:

Running was the superpower that made us human-which means it's a superpower all humans possess.

Of course I've been running for a long time, but Chris was talking about something more specific: endurance running, the kind our ancestors did when they were persistence-hunting antelope on the open savanna. For all the running I've done, I've never gone more than 18 miles at a pitch. To the protagonists in Chris's book, for whom a long run would be 30,40,50, one hundred miles, that's pocket change. I'm really wondering how they do it. How do you run 40 miles? Is it something any reasonably athletic person could do?

....is it something I could do?

Here we come to the purpose of this blog. This is intended to be a log of my attempt to discover whether I have a little of "humanity's original superpower" in me too. In addition it will be a narrative of my experiments with minimalist running and my attempts to get really, truly, completely healthy. To timebox the effort, I'm signing up for the Hyannis Marathon, February 28th. Not only do I mean to run 26 miles, I mean to run them, light quick and smooth, and I'm going to enjoy every last one of them.

How's that for a marathon goal?