4th Run in Vibrams 12/30/10

Run with Val today. We started out fast and ended up covering 2.08 miles in 15:37, leaving us with a 7:30 mile pace. The vibrams felt good today. My legs and feet feel much more free to do what they need to. I would however like to caution the trail runner against doing a few things. 1) running on pinecones. It doesn't "hurt" exactly, its just a bit uncomfortable, not enough for you to want to actually go out of your way to run around them, but enough for you to notice it. 2) avoid stiff weeds/dead plants. We were running on a slightly overgrown trail with dead weeds and plants sticking up out of the ground (for you westminster runners its the new trail that follows the fence on corncob hill) and as we were crashing through the weeds I got several splinters. Though, I didn't notice it on the run. When we stopped for me to change into my brooks (the original plan was to make a quick switch and run the remaining time in normal trainers) I noticed that my leg was bleeding. On further inspection I found that I had a splinter wedged under several layers of skin, too deep to cut out, but not deep enough to hurt badly. We spent a good 10 minutes trying to get it out, and when we finally did it measured half an inch long (this was after it snapped 2 or three times when we were trying to get it out.) So just a word of caution to those of you considering vibrams-watch the terrain you run on. Also, as promised, I ran a few hills today. I have nothing to complain about, I felt lighter going up the hill and my muscles didn't lock up as much as they did in my brooks. Muscularly I have to say, I enjoy running much more when I run in my vibrams then normal trainers. All in all it was a good day, besides the splinter incident. I will soon post how the second half of the run went.