Military man.

My younger brother JH is in the Air Force. He came to visit me a few weeks ago, during the stretch of time where I didn't run for eight days because the weather was crummy. I was very disappointed in the weather because JH had bought himself a pair of Treksports while he was visiting me, and I was looking forward to the opportunity for J and I to show him how to properly run. When we were in the shoe store, he did a short run down the main aisle of the store and he was shaking the displays with each heel-stomping step. I then did the same run, to show him how lightly and easily I land when I run, but I never got the chance to really run with him because the weather was so crummy. J especially was disappointed because my brother is pretty scrawny, and J wanted to show JH that a guy much bigger than him can still land as silently as I can.

I was home with my family over the weekend celebrating the Fourth of July and when we finally arrived back at the house, I told my brother that we were definitely going to run this morning. We were ready to go at around 9am, and after helping my father briefly, we set off down my parents' street. I ran here before, a week and a half in to my experiment, and I ran for 0.6 miles without stopping and ended up running a total of 1 mile. I knew that it would be a different experience to run in the hot sun entirely on pavement, but I figured I would be in good enough shape to potentially run a mile and a half. As I mentioned the first time that I ran at my parents' house, my father walks a two mile loop every day. With the quarter mile warm up and cool down, if I managed to run the entire rest of the way, I would be running a total distance of a mile and a half.

We made it the two blocks and took off running. My brother is a chatty little fellow when he runs. Usually when J and I run, I talk fairly intermittently and he is breathing too hard to respond. My brother just likes to yak yak yak. I also made the critical error of eating a yogurt for breakfast before I ran, so I had a side cramp almost immediately. I also took note of the fact that my brother still was landing hard on his heels while he was running. Quite frankly, I don't know how he does it. It never occurred to me to even attempt landing on my heel when I run; I have never done a single stride that way and the idea of it seems completely unnatural to me. That said, he obviously had a lot more experience with running than I did and had quite a bit of training to unlearn.

We ran all the way down my parents' street and past the landmark where I had stopped running three weeks ago. Although I had a cramp in my side, I breezed right past and continued to run through the dead end circle street that my father uses as a turn-around. By this point, my brother caught on to the fact that I was slipping into a rhythmic breathing pattern and I wasn't able to carry on conversation as easily anymore. Even though he spent the past three weeks sitting on his butt and just hanging out with my family, he still is used to running at altitude in Colorado Springs, so he wasn't even winded by this point. We got back on my parents' street and kept going. I started scoping out how much farther I had to go, and trying to estimate whereabouts a mile and a third would have been so that I could tell how far I had run in the past. Once we saw the spot where we were going to finish, my brother encouraged me to sprint to the end. I told him flat out that I didn't have it in me, so we finished at the same jogging pace that we had kept up the whole time.

We walked back to my parents' house and I went inside and grabbed my video camera to video us both running. I was able to put the videos on the computer and show him in slow motion the differences in how our feet land, and since the videos of J running were still on the memory card, I showed him how perfectly J lands. Hopefully it made a difference in how he thinks about running in the Vibrams, because I still worry about him heel striking.

For myself, I am pretty freaking thrilled that I was able to run a mile and a half today and keep up with my military brother. I do wish that J had been with me, but the fact that I was able to do this today was pretty cool. I figure that as long as I keep running farther each time I go out, I will continue to improve.