Rabbit, rabbit!

1

November 1, 2013 by Amy B

November 1! Time for rabbits and an October recap:

Favorite run: Well, clearly the most memorable was the TC Marathon. Not my best performance in terms of pace (and still a little bummed I fell apart in the middle), but memorable for sure. So much training goes into one morning of running; I tell myself every year to soak it all up and enjoy every minute, even the gory ones.

Fun run: The runningchunk.com 5K.

1) The “athletes”; 2) My prize for tying for second place; 3) First run of the day; 4) second run of the day; 5) Team /var/run

I hooked my Garmin up and synced the rest of my runs for the month and was a little disappointed at my total mileage for October.

Ninety four miles for the month, 26.2 of those being the marathon. If it had not been for my family being in town the past day and a half (and me taking two days to do nothing but clean in preparation), I would have gotten in a few more runs to put me into triple digits. Still, nearly one hundred miles is nothing to turn your nose up at, so I’ll get over it. I’m in good shape to hit my 200 mile goal before 12/31. I might readjust and just shoot for 100 miles each month. Totally doable.

This morning I decided to try the Newtons and go for a short spin in the neighborhood. I took a route that let me add/subtract miles easily as I saw fit.

I know they say to break these shoes in very slowly, but since I’ve been running in “minimalist” shoes, I figured I could go out for a few miles with no trouble.

This was mostly true.

My right foot felt great. After you get over the weird lugs on the bottom, they’re not really noticeable. In fact, I didn’t mind them at all. These aren’t really walking shoes, though. Walking around my kitchen felt like walking in my road biking shoes.

I took off at a reasonably easy pace and monitored my cadence. I was at roughly 180 steps per minute. Side note: my cadence has gone up from about 160 to 180 in the past five months. Not sure if this is good or bad.

I got about a half mile from the house and really noticed my left arch bothering me. This is pretty standard for me when I run, but it seems to go away after awhile. Today it not only didn’t go away but started to really hurt. At the point when this happened, I was about a mile from home. It seemed dumb to turn around; I knew I could do a loop that was about 2 miles from here. The pain started to subside (or was my foot just going numb?) and I started thinking of how I could sell these shoes on eBay. I was also kind of bummed out, because my right foot felt awesome – no problems.

I then wondered, did I go out too far in these for their maiden voyage? I turned the corner to head toward the house. My foot wasn’t hurting as badly but I also wondered if I’d changed my gait a little to try to mitigate the pain. I’d read somewhere that Newtons can sometimes reveal running deficiencies. Maybe that’s what was happening.

When I got back to the house 2.5 miles later, I felt like I could’ve gone a little further but decided to give it up. I didn’t want to wreck my foot before my weekend long run. I’m not sure what to think about these shoes. I did some rolling with my Tiger Tail roller and my foot feels fine.

I think I’ll try the shoes one more time for a shorter distance, but I’m not feeling very optimistic about these shoes, as much as I want to love them. Love the roomy toebox. Love the fit. Love the colors! But my left foot is kind of being an ass about them.

But what I do love: When a 9:30ish pace feels easy. Lazy, even. Maybe I really am making running progress.