I've got the shoes, now what?

Finally I got my shoes.  I bought them from Wasatch Running Center.  At the time they were the only place I could find Vibram fivefingers (henceforth to be called vffs).  Now I see them many places, including REI.  I mention REI only because they have a super awesome return policy, so if you try them and don't like them, you can bring them back for a refund.  My vffs felt fairly weird to start with - they are a bit of a pain in the butt to get on, at least initially.  You have to shove your forefoot in and then press down and wiggle your toes into the toe-pockets and then yank on the heel loop to pry the back up over your heel.  For the first few minutes they feel strange as the fabric of the toe-pockets forces your toes to splay slightly.  The only toe that really notices this splaying is my pinky toe, which is far more used to being smooshed into a shoe than pushed out by one.

Finally shod for "barefoot" running (I crack me up) I headed off to the gym to run on the rubberized track using the Couch to 5K plan, which is designed to get you from couch-potato to running 5 km in 9 weeks.  I definitely found that my aerobic capacity was crap and that running even 30 second sprints was taxing.  But I persevered.  It felt great to have a goal and a plan and to be actively working on it.  I felt acutely embarrassed by my sucking wind every time I did a running sprint, and for the 90 seconds following that I still couldn't control my breathing, but after each "running" session I felt a great sense of accomplishment.  And then I hit week 3.

I was running and something felt odd in my left forefoot.  I tried to shake it off, and then I decided to see if it went away while running.  While the strange feeling never fully went away it did recede quite a bit while I was running.  Later that day I went to an event at the South Towne Expo center, which has acres of hard concrete flooring and I was cursing myself for running that morning.  I looked it up online and found out that I have the dreaded "top of the foot" pain that runners can get, called Metatarsalgia.  I had a soreness like a stone bruise over the metatarsals of my left foot except for my big toe.  It was bad enough a week later that I went into the doctor's office to make sure that I didn't have a hairline fracture in my foot.  Which, thankfully, I did not.  But here I was, all hot to trot (again with the self-craking up) and that was expressly off the menu. Gah.  So I did the sensible thing for once in my life and pretty much laid off all exercise activity for a month.  A MONTH.  And my foot still hurt a little, but not badly and it didn't get worse during the day or early in the morning.  So I cautiously decided to get back to work.  

I started back with weightlifting one day and then resting the next to see what my foot would do.  After a week of that I alternated weightlifting and then brisk walking on the indoor track with my vffs on.  After a week of that I went back to weightlifting then running then weightlifting 6 days a week.  All told it took me about 6 weeks just to get back to doing my running program.  And even then I decided to be cautious and back up to the beginning and start over and slow down - again, an unusually smart move on my part, considering that I am so impatient.  But then again, I am also very very pain avoidant.