Sorry about the lack of updates - work has been crazy and I've not really had much to write about in my little world of running, but now I do .

So far the running has been going well. I'm slowly building up the "time on my feet" to get my body and feet used to running. This is mainly an injury prevention measure. I'm also trying to stick to the old adage that you shouldn't increase your mileage by more than 10% a week.

At the moment I'm up to 2x 18-20 min gentle runs a week with one in Vibrams and one in shoes, and 2-3 weights sessions in the gym broken up into upper body and lower body workouts (this is actually a major cut in the amount of gym work I used to do so is also taking a fair amount of getting used to). The runs have been going really well and I've not felt the slightest bit of pain or discomfort in either my feet or calves.

That is until I tried something different on Monday. Foolishly, I thought I might see if I can start throwing some speed work in to the mix and to get things going, thought I'd determine my Billat pace (aka vVO2) (mistake 1), in my Vibrams (mistake 2).

I took a leisurely jog down to a nearby park which has a path around it that is about a mile long (mapmyrun.com route

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I know what you're thinking: this blog is about running barefoot, why on earth am I mentioning rowing? Well, simple really: as you'll recall from my previous post, I'm not running at the moment and am using rowing to keep fit instead.

This month's UK edition of Runner's World (January '09) has an article on a method of training devised by Veronique Billat. The basic principle is you determine your vVO2 max and then train at that level using varying intervals. I'm a big fan of intervals (I know, I'm insane) and was quite eager to try this out however due to my self-imposed running "embargo", this is currently off the cards.

Fear not, I turned to my good friend - t'Internet - to see if I could find details on using this approach for rowing. Well, the best source of info I could find was this one which provides quite generic instructions, but doesn't explicitly mention rowing, and here which provides a bit more info and a handy calculator. As the instructions are quite generic, I couldn't see any reason why it shouldn't be possible.

So I've decided to see if I could apply the principles to rowing.

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