Whew, my calves are sore!

I woke up this morning with distinctly sore calves. The good kind of sore, though. The kind that says "You used and stretched these muscles and now they are recovering, good job." Thankfully, absolutely zero pain from my foot! It's still rather early to tell, but I still feel very much like this experiment of mine is actually working.

Today J wanted to go for a run, since he didn't get to go with me yesterday. I felt fine enough to walk, so we went to the park. He ran almost all of the way to the parking lot on the paved road (like I did yesterday!) while I walked, and then he walked back towards me. Once he saw me, he took off running again and ran back to the beginning of the park. We walked a different route today, up by the pond, and saw some geese and ducks. We ended up going up the trail on the hill today, despite the fact that it rained this morning. It was a leisurely climb, but we ended up being at a pretty high vantage point, which was cool. We took an unconventional way down, which is to say we didn't take the wide trails... we forged our own way, sort of. It was fun.

Once we got to the bottom, we used the Kodak Playsport that I had brought with us to film me running so I can take a look at my stride and make changes. I had filmed J earlier when he was running back towards me. I wasn't up to really running today, but I certainly was okay to handle the ten seconds of footage that J took for me.

Watching yourself run in slow motion as actually pretty freaking cool. Turns out I have muscles in my toothpicks that I barely even knew existed. From looking at the frames above, I can see that I'm landing too far out in front of my body, and I'm landing squarely on my forefoot instead of the more ideal landing on the outside of the foot. Everyone's landing is different, of course, but I think that landing on the outside of the foot is more efficient because it better uses the arch. The other thing that I notice is that it looks like I push off with my toes an awful lot. I've been watching videos about Pose running as well as reading anecdotal evidence online which says that you should think about your foot being lifted before it even hits the ground, and that you should use your quads and hamstrings to lift your foot up rather than push off with your toes. I'll have to watch some more videos of people actually doing these things, but this was a good exercise for me to realize that my form isn't actually as awesome as I think that it is.

Also! I actually have a goal now. My goal is to be running enough to do the Freedom Trail Run at some point this summer! J thinks it's a little premature to be thinking about running 5k, but with all the stops in between and the longest straight running distance being only half a mile, I think that he and I will both be ready sooner than he thinks!