Thorns

Rusinque

Barefooters
Jan 19, 2012
187
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houston, texas
How do you avoid thorns? Especially the ones that are little balls of thorns that are in the grass waiting for a foot to grap on to. They always make me cring and stop my perfect rythmic run(Most of the time).
 
Grin and bear it. You can't avoid what you can't see.

Rose thorns suck too. I ran through a spot where someone had been trimming their roses and stepped on a couple of stems with thorns still attached. Yeah, it sucked...
 
As long as it doesn't happen often, then you will eventually learn to deal with it, since those little nuisances are so well worth not having the horrible injuries you could have running in the wrong kinds of shoes. If it does happen often, then I would find another place to run.
 
I'll pick up one of these once in a while. Goat heads. All over the southwest.
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It gets easier with more foot conditioning. The smaller stickers no longer bother me and I can even pluck a cactus needle out of my foot with not much pain. I'll usually avoid grass. It hides many things.
 
balls of thorns, like gumballs from sweet gum trees? I HATE those!
 
We had/have goat heads where I used to live in San Diego County. I used to run around barefoot as a child, and I remember how those things really hurt bad.
 
You can usually avoid goat heads by not running through gravel parking lots, gravel on the sides of rural roads, and sidewalks next to vacant lots. They are also worse in the fall when the seed heads have dried out. They will be even more spiny if the landowner has tried to control them with a herbicide like Roundup.

I also had a lot of trouble with burr buttercup last spring and Russian thistle over the winter (pieces break off of the tumbleweed and are all over the roads).
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The pieces of these weeds would break off and become embedded in my feet. My wife would then dig them out with a needle. (I kind of miss that attention now that I have thicker soles.)

Moral of the post. You have to become a weed/sticker expert and learn the life cycle of the plants and what type of environment they are found. Info a shod runner could care less about.
 
Man, I miss living there. I miss seeing tumbleweed blowing across the roads and a good dust storm now and again. I lived in horse country (Lakeside-Santee-El Cajon area) for years, and as a kid and teenager, and I walked everywhere to get anywhere. There were goat heads all over the place and tumbleweed too. I also lived closer to the ocean in East San Diego (did some back and forth moving growing up, parents, divorce, you know the story), where I didn't have to worry about goat heads, and never saw tumbleweed. Oh, and I could get around on my skateboard...and bike, but I also walked all over the place too. Miss it there.
 
Plenty of those over here as well. I was running along a grassed area between the houses and sand dunes and stood on a couple of them, yeaouch. As we are into Autumn they have all dried off and are waiting for the winter rains to germinate, this is the worst time of year for them. It will be ok in a few months they will all have greened up again. They don't bother me as much as they did earlier on, I can just pull them out quickly.

Neil
 
Rusinque - do you have a photo? You've got me curious. You are in South America, right? It's probably fall there and the thorns are bad in the fall.

I noticed another sticker in town yesterday along the sidewalks. Lawn burweed. Probably a little annoying when they dry out.
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That stuff looks familiar, Rus, but I can't remember where I have encountered it.

A whole site dedicated to goat heads. Hmmmm. Sounds as weird as that site dedicated to those loons who run barefoot.
 
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