pain is weakness leaving the body

after running regularly for over 10 years i am no stranger to different kind of pains and injuries. most of the damages done to my legs and feet have been due to overdoing things - i have a tendency for this - and i know how it feels to hurt in almost every part of your legs from hip to toes. as a whole though i haven´t had that much troubles - i guess this is partly because i am relatively small in physical size. if a man of 100kgs would have ran the amount i have, i reckon problems might have been bigger in quantity and scale. 


after running that ten years like most of us do, with padded sneakers and a proper heel-strike, i switched my technique completely about a year ago from heel-strike to striking with the balls of my feet.  this is closer to the way the human feet is designed to be used when running; the shock impact caused by the landing is much smaller when striking with the ball of feet than with heel as the foot acts like a spring, lessening the impact. it of course requires time and patience, to re-calibrate your muscles and movement patterns you have spent your entire (running) life learning, and to strengthen the small muscles and joints in your feet which have got lazy in the padded shoes.


during summer i also made a switch in my running shoes, dropping all else and using only minimalistic shoes, more specifically  vibram fivefingers. it is truly a magnificent feeling to run with them, feeling the ground through the thin soles; this, however, hasn't come without some problems. my feet have needed - and still do -  time to adjust to this new way of running, and i have been forced to cut done my weekly kilometers. this has required patience i haven't always had, and pushing my feet too much has every now and then caused pain due to over stressing them. 


it is unbelievably frustrating not to be able to run as much as i would want to, especially now when it has become so enjoyable again that i actually await in the evening for the morning to come so i can go running. so i am forced to think whether or not i should cut back using the vibrams a bit and use the regular sneakers every  now and then - maybe running what i now consider wrong is still better than not running enough.