Switch to Biking?

My running is better when I'm barefoot. My knees hold out for longer. This weekend I felt pretty great. My knees were doing well, and I did some good sprints at the end.

Then later that night I noticed a strange pain in the top of my foot, but I forgot about it and went to bed.

Then the next morning I walked to work, and a few minutes into my walk my foot started hurting a lot. By the time I got to work it was really bad. I googled "pain on top of foot" and a bunch of barefoot running sites came up. Hmmm.

Now it's 2 days after my run and my foot hurts just as much. I was about to walk in to work again today but given the pain I have decided to take the bus, because I imagine something needs to heal. And now I feel pissed off that I'm not getting my daily hour's walk to and from work. I don't know what on earth I did. My foot didn't hurt at all while I was actually running. I've never had foot pain from running before in my life.

If it's not my knee, it's my foot...am I just not cut out for running? Every year I get a little more frustrated and contemplate giving it up for something else, and then things get a little better and I stick it out, and it's this cycle of better, worse, better, worse. The cycle has beeng going on since 2003, so that's kind of a long time to stick with something that keeps aggravating various injuries. But it is so heartbreaking to think about giving something up that I love so much!

Maybe this stubbornness of mine is just dumb, and I can come to love biking just as much as running. Maybe this weekend I'll get on my bike and spend an hour doing that and see how it feels.

My graduate student and my post doc are training together for a marathon this May. I actually feel physically jealous when they talk about it. Like, my stomach hurts because I feel so bummed out that I can't do what they're doing. This is silly. It is time to let go, maybe. It's just running. It's not that big of a deal. I bet biking can be fun too, right?