I’m about to go buy my first ever pair of running shoes…specifically, trail running shoes.\u00a0\u00a0 I ran everywhere as a kid (except when forced to not run) and loved running, but there was no girls’ track anywhere in the region, then.\u00a0\u00a0 I was the fastest kid in my grade,\u00a0 up until 7th, beaten by an older and taller boy who’d been held back.\u00a0 But not by much.\u00a0\u00a0 By HS girls were not allowed to run on the track, EVER.\u00a0 Distracts the boys, you know.\u00a0\u00a0 And might harm their egos when some of us (some of us were very fast) outran them, just as we’d been doing since first grade, despite being told it was unladylike, that girls should never beat boys, etc, etc, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 I ran early in the mornings in college, on a track on the far side of the campus…ran there, ran on the track, ran back.\u00a0\u00a0 No track meets for girls.\u00a0 Girls were supposed to run for fitness tests, but only then.\u00a0 But it felt good to run.\u00a0 Sometimes ran with friends, for the sheer joy of it.<\/p>\n
So when I lost enough weight that I had the urge to run again, and thought it wouldn’t do in my hip and knee joints, I tried a few steps.\u00a0 It felt weird at first…I had a kinesthetic memory of how it *had* felt, but the legs didn’t respond the same.\u00a0\u00a0 And yet…a tickle of how fun it might be.\u00a0 Every day, out walking on the land, in an area where I couldn’t be seen by others, I tried a little more, a little more.\u00a0 One day the new feel and the old feel merged…this WAS running, just slow and as if I’d been sick or injured.\u00a0 So I began a slow form of interval work…walk to warm up, then run some steps, then walk again….and awhile later, the same thing.\u00a0 Two, three, four times during a day’s walk.\u00a0\u00a0 Not pushing till it hurt, or I couldn’t go on, but trying to increase just a teeny bit the number of steps.<\/p>\n
As a kid, I ran along the edge of farmers’ fields, down streets, down country roads., through orchards even.\u00a0\u00a0 On the beach, when we went there.\u00a0 Up the slope of the Second Street Canal (steep.)\u00a0 On the paths we kids made in vacant lots.\u00a0 As a younger woman (20s, 30s)\u00a0 I backpacked in mountainous areas and ran on those trails at times.\u00a0 (I once ran down the steep switchbacks of the South Rim rail out of the Basin in the Chisos at Big Bend National Park,\u00a0 using my 6 foot bamboo pole like a skier’s pole to make the turns.\u00a0\u00a0 Mistake.\u00a0\u00a0 Great fun, but my quads seized up after I’d been driving for a couple of hours.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’d heard “never run down a steep slope” but I’d done it on short slopes, no problem. )<\/p>\n
Now I was running on our land, the mowed or cleared (though the brush of the Dry Woods), first 10 steps, then 20, then 50, 60, 75…and\u00a0 then 100, and then more than 100 at a time.\u00a0\u00a0 And it felt *right*.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And I felt good about it.\u00a0\u00a0 I have no expectation of “doing anything” with the running, except enjoying it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yesterday I ran about 500 steps in multiple tries.\u00a0 So running is a thing again.\u00a0 And on this land, with a mix of surfaces from solid rock to loose sharp-edged gravel,\u00a0 sand and clay baked hard, mown grass that’ s sometimes separate bunchgrass clumps with dirt between them…no pair of shoes I have is working for me.\u00a0\u00a0 I need to be able to walk\/run on all of them, upslope and down (very gentle slopes), on trails that tilt sideways, on trails with toe-trapping holes or equally toe-trapping pedestaled mounds of bunchgrass.\u00a0 On fallen branches,\u00a0 some of them thorny, cactus sprouts, and even (though I hope not!!) on snakes in the trail.\u00a0 And none of my shoes are OK for that.\u00a0 I have a pair of very old, very worn trail shoes that need to be replaced, but they never were that good to run even a few steps in.\u00a0 The barn boots (rubber) are not meant for hiking (though I’ve worn them a lot with the conditioning walks)\u00a0 and are very hard to run even 20 steps in.\u00a0 The tennis shoes let me feel every rock even just walking up the north fence trail where the harshest loose rock is.<\/p>\n
And so…I started looking at discussions of, and reviews of, and brands of, running shoes…discovered that there are running shoes specific to running on natural land with a variety of surfaces.\u00a0 And shortly, I hope, I’ll have a pair that have a “rock plate” to protect my foot from stobs, rocks, and other pointy things, that fit my foot, and then…gradually, bit by bit, I’d like to be able to run a little farther, a little faster, when it’s the kind of day that reminds me of being a kid.\u00a0\u00a0 Older, slower, but still…still having fun.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m about to go buy my first ever pair of running shoes…specifically, trail running shoes.\u00a0\u00a0 I ran everywhere as a kid (except when forced to not run) and loved running, but there was no girls’ track anywhere in the region, then.\u00a0\u00a0 I was the fastest kid in my grade,\u00a0 up until 7th, beaten by an Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-1007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1007"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1008,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007\/revisions\/1008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}