I ran my third barefoot race. Since last two went pretty well, I ran it less conservatively and managed to shred 20sec per mile. The splits were 8:57, 8:43, 8:30, 9:03, 7:52 The weather was hot and humid and it was hard running on abrasive central park loop in heat. Also the "showers" set up by nyrr every mile were great but made it easy for foot get blisters. I was lucky that the race was just 5miles otherwise I could have had blister problem.
As usual, it was a negative split race. Also I got more questions about my vibrams after the race than barefooting. I also realized that now I have learnt which parts of central park loop have grass or dirt walkpath next to it which I can run for a while. Also there were no aches after the race...at all. This is in stark contrast with pretty much every race I have run before with shoes. I continue to believe that this is primarily because I am running the races very conservatively when barefoot. The primary focus for me is to build barefoot mileage per week at this point up to say 40mi/week including long runs. So speed takes a backseat.
But I am very optimistic about running fast miles after running a sub-8min mile today. In fact the speed at finish-line was incredible 6:30min/mile and it did not feel too hard. Interestingly enough I was just 40sec behind the exact same race last year in shoes in similar hot weather (which was technically a PR for 5mi distance though I have faster PRs at longer distances) . So I am looking forward to beating my previous year's race timings later in the season.
BF for 136mi
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