Running barefoot at 50 degrees and an untimely phone call

The current temperatures have reminded me of my friend Pepe when he started running in minimalist shoes.

That's not his real name, although what I'm about to tell you is.

My transition to minimalism was very slow and programmed, that is, I was never in a hurry.

I supported my runs with days of exercises to reactivate my feet and strengthen my legs. And in between I rested.

Everything was very controlled, everything was done very slowly.

The thing is that I did well and after a few months I was running popular races with mediocre times, but that were far superior to my muffled self.

In a town you know everything and Pepe echoed my progress.

One day we met on the athletics tracks, at that time on asphalt, around 8pm. Pepe wanted to learn my new way of running.

It was summer, Andalusia and 8 pm. A day like today, with 40 degrees in the shade.

When something motivates us a lot, there is no temperature, no rain, no walking gentleman that gets in our way. Pepe was excited about learning and I was excited about the progress I was making.

So, hunger and the desire to eat came together.

Things went well while we were wearing shoes. Pepe started off with a good running technique, which was not very harmful, but there were some things that needed to be improved, one of them was the cushioned shoes he wore, which caused him to land on his toes.

Pepe landed on his forefoot, but his heel did not touch the ground, he ran as if on tiptoe. In the style of the great Chiquito de la Calzada, the record and sinner of the prairie.

Nobody had taught him to run like that, it was the way he had derived his technique.

This way of running caused him discomfort in his heel, surely he had an overused calf and Achilles' tendon.

I told her that if she let her heel touch the ground, it would relax the back muscles of her leg and with it the Achilles tendon. But for that, he could not use the current shoes, which with their high heel would never let the tendon and musculature elongate, on the contrary, he was shortening it.

Anyway, leaving the technical issues behind, the matter led to the two of them being barefoot on an asphalt track at 50ºC. I just wanted him to run one lap, to feel that he could run barefoot and that it was a contact shot.

After the lap, Pepe was amazed. He could have run barefoot on asphalt!

All this would have been no joke if Pepe had stopped.

But he kept on running and every time he passed me he would raise his thumb and tell me that I was in great shape.

Five laps and apparently no problems, until he got home.

Now comes the untimely call, from Pepe's wife. Known to me since childhood and with a certain amount of confidence.

She told me that he was crazy, that her husband (my friend) had the plants in the red, that he didn't stop complaining and what solution he gave her.

The solution would have been to run only one lap barefoot, because of the prudence and the little by little, or to use some minimalist shoes.

That's what they are for, to protect us from extreme heat and cold.

In this case, I would have recommended pure minimalist shoes for asphalt.

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