I love weekends especially when the sun is shining and we manage to head down to the beach for a run. Today, rather than doing our usual thirty or so minutes we ran for over an hour which was great, albeit slow. Running on medium to soft sand is challenging. Your feet sink into the sand with each step and it’s much more exhausting than running on the road with shoes on. I do like to do at least one run each week barefoot, I’ve found that running on the sand is strengthening my ankles, knees and hips so hopefully less injuries in the future. In the beginning my legs ached a lot, but now even with a run barefoot of over an hour my legs feel fine, though it was good to walk in the cold water as the waves were crashing at the shore. It had a similar cooling effect to that of a cold bath after a long session which I have to admit I’m not prone to do, but since we were already at the beach it was silly not to get into the water even if it was just up to the knees.
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| a quick workout on the monkey bars after our run (a few months ago I could not do that – I think working on the chin ups has helped…a lot) |
Speaking of barefoot running, I’m currently in the middle of reading ‘Barefoot Runner: The life of a marathon champion Abebe Bikila.’ Bikila was the first black African to win a gold medal at the Olympics. He won the marathon in Rome in 1960 running barefoot and went on to win another gold medal in Tokyo in 1964. The book takes you on a journey of a boy joining the Imperial Guard of the Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia as a teenager to becoming a champion marathon runner. It’s an easy read with short chapters and a good story. The downside of the book is that the author does not provide any documentation to support the story. Most of the figures mentioned in the book have been dead for a number of decades include Abebe Bikila who died in 1973. A few references here and there would have made the book a bit more credible. Nevertheless it has been an enjoyable read even if it is mostly a work of historical fiction.
