beach / gower

I sleep with my blinds open at night in the hopes that the sun will come out in the morning and wake me with a wave of light. As you can imagine, it doesn't happen too often here, but it did this morning, and since the sun is out, im heading to the beach. So here's some recent beach pics of the bay here in swansea and some of the gower that i took when Tim came out and visited this last week, so you can appreciate what ill be appreciating here in a bit...

barefoot running

There's something about barefoot running that really appeals to me. It's the simplicity of the whole thing. I've always enjoyed running in general, over biking and what not, for that reason, and getting out there with (literally) nothing but a pair of shorts on adds more of a kind of primitive and connected element to what you're doing.

I've been working in barefoot runs for a few months now mostly on trails, and on the beach out her in swansea, and I'm convinced that it's been helping my running + it just kind of feels good to do, I worked in 5 barefoot miles of the 16 I ran today along the beach and it felt great! I've been, or I should should say "had" been, keeping up with Tony Krupicka's blog (an avid 180mi a week or so runner and ultramarathon winner who's a big proponent of barefoot running) until he stopped running back in June, and subsequently stopped blogging for the most part, due to having a couple of neuroma's in one of his feet.

With that said, I still think that running barefoot can be good for you if it's done in moderation. If you've never run barefoot before I suggest you give it a shot, just the act of doing it will force you to run in a different way that you might be used to. You end up running mainly on the balls of your feet because, for lack of a better explanation, it just hurts to much to do the standard "land on the heel and roll with it" kind of approach - it's way too jaring on the body to do it that way, so instead you end up treading with quick and light steps which creates less impact on the body and increases leg turnover. Here's a good article on it if you're interested in more about it... http://www.marathonandbeyond.com/choices/clift.htm.

the beach - swansea

So im admittedly spoiled here, Swansea is the closest university in the world to the beach, and the weather's been unheardofly sunny for the last week or so. I've been heading down for runs about every other day sans camera, but I did get a few pictures the other day when I walked down with a friend. There was some guy out there with a shovel and a bucket, so we stopped him to ask what he was doing and took a few pics. Apparently he was digging for fishing worms...





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