I hope you haven't missed my pithy commentary too much over the past few weeks. Family and other obligations have kept me pretty busy during the times I usually write the blog. My goal is to always put up one entry every week, but I won't always succeed at that.
Today I want to talk about that dreaded malady of hikers and runners everywhere: blisters. As you may remember from an earlier post, I developed a blister on my right heel during my trip to Utah with friends. Up until that point, I hadn't had a blister in several years. During the trip I wore a relatively new pair of trail runners, which up to that point, had not caused me any blister problems. But a powerful combination of sand and water combined to weaken my skin in that area and plague me with the dreaded affliction.
Fast forward to now and I'm still suffering from a recurring blister in that same spot. It usually shows up during when I'm hiking, but it also has more recently been popping up when I do some of my running--particularly during trail runs when running uphill forces more contact between my heel and the shoe. It's mostly showing up with those same trail runners, but now I also have to careful in my running shoes due to fact that the area is just not very tough since I seem to keep aggravating it.
I've tried taping the area before hiking or trail-running to limited success. Sometimes it works, more often lately it doesn't. I've had to stop using my trail runners to run and I will probably need to figure out something to do for hiking--or at least stop hiking for awhile if I want to give the skin a chance to heal fully. Since I’m training to run the Cutthroat Classic in August, it's difficult to stop running for a few weeks as it will interrupt my training regimen, and besides it's not really the running shoes that's causing the problem. If this keeps up, I may end up hiking and doing my trail runs in my road running shoes!
Hopefully you have not been dealing with blisters as you've been increasing your hiking this season, but if you have, here's a link to a good article on the Internet about dealing with blisters both proactively and retroactively. One thing I would add is to work with some lacing techniques if your heel is slipping (see this YouTube video for a really great demo of the technique). You can also use your laces to in a similar fashion to tighten or loosen other areas if you find they are rubbing in bad ways. If you need more help, go to an outdoor store and get an experienced staff member to help you with some different techniques.
One thing I don't like about my trail runners is that they don't have conventional laces; rather they come with a "quicklace" system which while making it easy to tighten the laces and keep them tight, doesn't allow for customizing the lace fit in different areas of the foot. If I tighten the laces enough to keep my heel stabilized, I also tighten them equally around the sides of my feet--which is too tight for my comfort. So I may be in the market for a new pair of trail runners--this one with good old fashioned laces!
Of course, this advice comes with the admonition that you must deal with the hotspots that are the telltale signs of blisters-in-the-making as soon as you start feeling them. Blisters don't get better if you ignore them--they get worse. And you're not slowing the group down by dealing with them in their infancy--you're taking care of yourself so that you can continue to enjoy the trip and not injure yourself. Happy feet make for happy hikers!
Hope to see you on the trail soon--without blisters, of course!
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