I speak of shoes

I mentioned earlier that I would explain how I survived my first tri season on a 10 year old pair of cross country racing flats and with which shoe I eventually replaced them. While I don't have a picture of my old shoes to post right now, I'll work on getting one up soon so as to help with the appreciation for their age.

First, however, it needs to be discussed why and how I chose to run a season on such old and worn out shoes rather than any of the viable options sitting in my closet...

While I don't personally own, nor I have I used, the Newton shoes, check out their website http://www.newtonrunning.com/run-better to get an introduction to the idea of forefoot running as opposed to heal striking. This helps to understand part of the reason I had recurrent issues when I increased my mileage with traditional heavy heeled shoes such as Asics or Salomon trail running shoes. Not only was I naturally a heavy heel striker, I found that when I put on my old racing flats, I achieved essentially the same benefit as the barefoot running idea and found that running was more comfortable and efficient without so much padding on my heels.

However, over a season of irregular running schedules, my feet rebelled against the poor internal structure of the old shoes, particularly the poor choice of seem placement and my choice to run barefoot in preparation for and in racing triathlon.

Thus, after my scare with plantar fasciitis after the 2008 US Open and the full foot blistering, I went to Luke's Locker in Dallas, one of those great places where they actually take a look at your foot structure and form and recommend a shoe based on your stride rather than just aesthetic preferences. The shoe I ended up with and have been highly satisfied with since mid October with regular running is...



The Saucony Grid Type A2, and I now wear socks on all training runs and will save the barefoot running for races only. You may notice there still is not much heel, but that's the idea, with a reduced cushion in the heel, I have learned to adapt my running stride from a severe heel strike to a more efficient forefoot stride.

Additionally, something I came across only after researching triathlon gear, but would recommend for all runners is my locklaces, check em out at http://www.locklaces.com/home.html . Not only do they make transitions fast by eliminating the need to tie shoes, but for regular training runs, it keeps pressure constant from day to day.

That's all for now, there's more to come,

Peanutt

Not (necessarily) triathlon related

According to my weekly training recap, I reached my "Prep" period weekly goal of 7 training hours. This is of course based on the legendary Joe Friel's ¨The triathlete's training bible¨annual training plan. The week was evenly divided into 150-165 minutes each of swimming, biking, and running - next week marks the first week of Base period 1, which means little more than weekly hours go up to....10, I think....I'm still ˆbrandˆnew to the whole blog thing, so I'll have to check out the details and edit later if necessary.

Concerning the post's title...I don't particularly prefer to be awake this close to midnight, but I've been working on flash cards for Greek and it's all I can do to stay motivated this early in the semester. For those interested, in the Greek dialect used during Jesus' day, known as Koine Greek, one word can be used in place of an entire English sentence. I'm sure it was great for condensing conversations back in the day, but it makes translation difficult due to the different inflections it can involve and the lack of context which usually provides all the necessary subtleties that make accurate translation easier. For example λελυμἐνος is the single Greek word for the English phrase "after having loosened (for myself)" as opposed to λελυκώς which means "after having loosened (for someone else)." 

If you're still reading at this point, we both need to go to bed, I hope to include in upcoming posts the following topics:

• How I survived my first season of triathlons on a pair of 10 year old cross country spikes and with which shoe I finally chose to replace them.
• How I can justify a goal of completing an Olympic distance triathlon (US Open) in under 2 hours in only my second season of training (***See quote above in title for partial answer***)
• Why my dad's 20-something year old Panasonic DX-2000 road bike gets more mileage than my beloved Cervelo P3-sl.
• How I came to realize that swim fins and hand paddles are ˆnotˆ just for wimps who want to go faster during swim drills and take it easy on themselves.

Till then, good night,

P