The official Dwars Door Mechelen results!

The results are in, I finished 1717th with a nice 0:56:33 time! Barefoot & with a backpack.
And huge congratz to my 2 fellow runners as well!

The results will also be on sport.be.msn.com/../dwarsdoormechelen/../uitslagen/ tomorrow, including the recorded finish and official stats: 56:34minutes, 5:50 m/km, 10.29 kmph.
And this is my run, thanks to MyTracks and my Android phone..

Some things I noticed.

• Nobody runs with a backback. And when you do, people seem to consider that extra hard.
• Nobody runs barefoot. (except me)
• When people see someone running barefoot, they think you forgot your shoes
• When people see someone running barefoot slowing down and messing with the backpack, they figure you’re finally taking your shoes.
• When people see someone running barefoot , they wonder if it hurts. (it doesn’t)
• When people see someone running barefoot after 7+km, they congratulate you and wish you luck or congratulate you. (very nice, thank you!)
• Barefoot running has the extra issue that when its cold, your lower leg muscles need to warm up decently, this was a problem the first 3km. After that it was ok.
• The barefoot running in the cold problem was aggravated by the slight rain at around 4km. This cooled my feet even further.
• I ran the first 5km without a sweat
• I ran the total 10km without a problem on a stamina level
• My knees did protest after 7km, though nothing compared to the problem after those 2km with shoes earlier this week.
• After 8km, I felt blisters forming on my feet but visual inspection was OK so I finished.
• I believe the blisters are only because of lack of training. I had not run more than 3km barefoor before.

So, barefoot running was a great experience.
I don’t feel like taking it beyond 10km at the moment, but 10 km is a very good distance to run. No sweat 🙂

As for the now.. There is some big blistering on my feet and my knees are slowly recuperating. I have no idea why the blisters are there, but I noticed the difference in running after about 8km and that was right after the parts with the gravel and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s part of the problem. Gravel is not the friend of a barefoot runner. And there was a kind of fine gravel too and that was horrible! Other footing was quite ok..

My goal was to finish. I expected to run it under the hour. So I am very happy 🙂