It's been a long November, huh?
I took a rest day today, mostly because of the cold rain that fell. A day off didn't seem like a bad thing, and then thinking about that cold rain, it seemed even better! I can be easy like that.
Of course one of things that we barefooters end up talking about and thinking about a lot is form. Mostly because when a person runs barefoot, that person then gets tied into the body's feedback system that evolution wired together for us. I know my running has been evolving a lot over the past 15 or 16 months now. I think the initial switch over to barefoot after a lifetime of being shod can usually help a person's form improve, but we also need to take into account that there might be some remedial work needed as well. One thing I've definitely come to observe in myself is that I think wearing shoes as a kid really really screwed up my running development. I was a slow runner as a kid. To some extent, I just may not be a fast runner anyhow, but shoes prevented me from running properly. I still remember that my basic instinct as a kid when running is that to go faster, obviously one must stride farther. Of course that has some truth to it, but it loses truth when a person overstrides. And when we overstride, it becomes harder for our body to properly engage the gluteus muscles. Then when you combine how much sitting our modern culture does, my running form was poor and I didn't use my butt too much.
Now, going barefoot helped me to shorten the stride and quicken the tempo, but I still had years of ingrained habit of using muscles other than the glutes to run with. I think that was a factor in the angry left hip flexor problem I developed over the summer, because while my right glute wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders, the left one was even worse. I've always been badly imbalanced between how coordinated my left and right sides are. The right side is dextrous and strong, the left side clumsy and week. Perfectly ideal running form would see a runner with equal or nearly equal strength and coordination on both sides of the body. So with that still dormant left glute, I was running with better form, but still not using a vital component of the stride.
And that's not entirely for lack of strength in the glutes. At times in the past, I've built up to where I could deadlift more than 2x my bodyweight. I couldn't do it now, but I went and tested today, and found I could still pull one rep of 1.6x my bodyweight, which is probably better than what most sedentary people can do. But to some extent, strength is a skill. Just because I have the skill to pull that much weight in the deadlift, it doesn't mean my body knows how to put it to use when I actually run.
So that's where remedial work like drills and hill sprints can be helpful to someone like me. Yesterday when I ran easy I noticed there's a subtly different feel to the stride. I've noticed it before, but it's been getting clearer over the past few weeks. I don't have to think about it, but if I listen to my body while it runs and if I go check down around the hips, I can feel the glutes working now. They probably still aren't fully activated for running, but they're learning now and I think the hill sprints and form drills like skipping, buttkicks and 100 ups have been helping.
It's very clear that evolution made our butts the biggest muscles in our bodies for a purpose of running. For some people who take up running, there is some chance that they won't have glutes that fire properly. And that's a problem because that means the butt is just dead weight slowing you down instead of driving you along like it should.