Yeah after a few times injuring myself i switched to barefoot-ish and minimal footwear, it’s awesome.
The only reason i injured myself in april is my quite sudden increase of intensity which destroyed me. Otherwise i’m just going to rotate between my minimal footwear and use the Altras once in a while (and also on race days)
Yes I’m late to the party 
But always open to new ideas no matter how old and only putting hours into youtube now!
I’m not putting my knee injuries alone down to running shoe, I was a very good Squash player, knees took a lot of strain on the squash court in those days… My issue with the cushioned/support trainers now is they don’t help my knees.
My running style (heal striker) probably was also a problem and possibly the higher heel of the shoe contributed to that…IMO cushioning and support will always weaken your feet and makes you require more cushioning and support. Weak feet aren’t going to help your knees. That’s the way I’m seeing it.
There are far more research/opinions about this online, I’m not going to regurgitate.
My own experience shows me that when I started up several times slowly in my various makes of Solomon’s trainers I would experience the knee swelling and pain. In this I do contribute some blame to the shoe as going zero drop, zero support whilst slowly building up my feet again with the five fingers I can now run again. Not yet daily, I’m in no rush but will get the volume up and listen to my body and switch to fast low impact walk when required. There’s no way I’d return to any support or cushioning in a running shoe, this new tool works for me, the other didn’t and isn’t getting anymore chances.
You’ve been very lucky with your injury rate as you appear well below the average if you research incident/injury rates of runners per 1000 hours. Sounds like you’re doing everything right for you and wish you well for your future running. I was mainly injury free from 2002-2015 running several times a week, just the snapping of knees finished that, out of the blue, no warnings, in two weeks both went!
I have read that lots of people got hurt changing over, I can see why, like you say some people do too much too soon. I won’t be suing five fingers as its made me a better runner and more importantly, one who can run for enjoyment again.
At the end, thats all what matters.
Run with whatever help you keep running!
best of luck!
yup, absolutely, good for you! I just wanted to caution other people who may have been reading your experience that there’s another side to going “full minimalist”: if your form is terrible and you don’t re-train your muscles, tendons and bones very slowly, going minimalist will get you injured.
Yes very wise words, I would recommend they do their research thoroughly before considering it. Hopefully in reading they realise I had nothing to lose and even after three months it’s going to take many more, if not a year or two before my feet etc are fully adapted.
If anything, going minimalistic, should make you less of a heel striker, which is probably a good things (some people argue that it doesnt matter).
Maybe once you are no longer striking with the heel, then other shoes should do the trick
Yes I no longer heel strike, barefoot style has made my form far better and I guess I could then return to the other trainers…but then there is no toe space which I love, the feeling of the ground and I’m still a believer that the support and cushioning will weaken my strengthen feet again and possible impact on knees again.
I’m just happy where I am, where I’m heading and don’t want to rock the boat!
Dont get me wrong.
I personally don’t like the super cushioning shoes. Have tried them before and I feel terrible running with them.
I like road feeling. I tend to buy my shoes slightly more firm than most people
You can attain that without having to go minimalistic.
But again, do what makes you happy!
Ouch… Only had the one thorn go through so far.
I’m no Podiatrist but from what I’ve read a bit of barefoot should help GF with the low arches…
Makes total sense. Most pros do barefoot strides/cool downs after workouts a couple of times a week to keep the sensory patterns and the form in check, and to do a bit of feet strenghtening.
Once I’m fully recovered from the tendonitis and have no fear of getting re-injured I do plan to alternate between minimalist shoes and Altras, to ease into things. Until then, only Altras it is!
I like my V-Alphas for the feel of the ground, plenty of cushioning here 
I no longer live near a beach, similar time frame to you, only time I get to run on beaches is on holidays.
She sounds far more experience than me with running than I’ll ever be, I’ll withdraw any advice 
I signed up for a fun 5k and don’t want to be slow for it. I don’t need to be fast, but I won’t have fun if I run my slowest ever time. Right now I’m in sweetspot base. Any thoughts on just replacing one of the weekly sweetspot workouts with similar efforts on the track (probably extended 10k tempo intervals) so that I have some level of running economy when the race rolls around?
I would replace 2 and add an extra day of brick or double.
track focus (400 - 1 miles repeats)
tempo run (1 up, 3-4 tempo, 1 down)
LR (in your case probably non stop for 7 or 8 miles)
If you want to do good, you need time on your legs
Thanks! I don’t know if I want to do “good”. My memory from high school is that a month of casual running got me to a sub 19:00 5k, so cycling is probably still the priority, but I’d love to just scrape some running fitness so that I can put in a good effort.
Alternative… Run 3-4 miles daily (after the bike or at some point during the day) and do one quality run day (and just run that day)
And alternate between speed (400-1 miles repeats) and tempo.
How long ago was high school?
If you are a life long athlete, you can probably get around with approach #2 i mention before…
This is probably more what I was looking for! I don’t need to run a PR, I just don’t want to run my worst time by a significant margin, haha.
You just need some volume.
Running muscles =/= cycling muscles. You need to make sure you know how to pace correctly (dont go out too quick) and that the correct muscles have enough strength to sustain the pace you are looking for.
So.
Do a 2 mile time trial… (wu 1 mile, 2 miles as fast as you can run 2 miles, 1 cool down).
This will give you a baseline of where you are right now.
Then you can use a calculator like the JackDaniels one (Jack Daniels' VDOT Running Calculator | Run SMART Project) to figure out the pace you “should” be training at.
Best of luck and keep us posted!
Thanks for the input! I appreciate it. You’re right about the cycling and running muscles. I was on a family trip with some great running routes a month ago, and went out and did back to back 10+ mile days. No problem while I was running, but on the plane ride home, I think that I could feel every running muscle that hadn’t been engaged in cycling, haha.