Five Fingers for Lunch

Today was our last day of the yearly CSAP testing at school. The kids left the building at 12:30, I locked my door and changed into running clothes in the corner of the room out of view of the door's window and worked my toes into the Vibram toe receptacles. I don't want to wear them out running on pavement so I decided to run around the school track...and I mean around it; it's asphalt so I stayed on the turf on the outside and on the infield. It was sunny and about 50 degrees. I did five miles at 8:48 pace which was enough; my calves were feeling it toward the end and I also developed a blister on the lower outside edge of the left big toe joint. I am either going to have to build up some callous there or use Vaseline which I'm hesitant to do because it could end up sloppy or messy in there. My guess is that true barefoot runners who occasionally wear them have enough callous to not have this type of issue.

This morning was the first time in a long while (several months) that I didn't have pain stepping out of bed. I thought maybe the PF was relenting. After the run today I could press down on the heal and make it be painful. I want to believe the barefoot running is alleviating the inflammation somehow.

I am optimistic about getting faster and being able to run farther. I definitely find myself running in them how I would run if I were playing a sport that involved running fast like soccer or baseball. Even though my distances were long before and my times were OK and I certainly had a runner's mindset I feel like everything I did before was jogging now and this is running. Would it offend (myself included, although I don't really take offense to anything)to say that heal strikers in motion-control-stabilizing-cushioning running shoes actually jog?