It was a long weekend that felt like it was only 20 minutes. Friday Alaska Adam came in to town so I took the day off to see him. We had one goal and that was to visit Fleet Feet and get some new shoes. For the past few months I’ve been trying to alternate between 2 pairs to try and gain some extra life out of them. But I really favor my Nike Triax Strcuture 13’s and have worn them down significantly.
So Adam and I hit up Fleet Feet to check out their Fitlosophy system and find the “right” shoes. We got to work with Matt, one of the Fleet Feet team members and he was awesome! I got on the treadmill and did a quick jog while Matt analyzed my run. It was no surprise to me that he said I was a pretty severe over pronator. But after going over the video in slow-mo, he showed my why I go through shoes (specifically the heel) so quickly. I tend to land overly hard on the heel of my shoes, which means I’m not transferring my balance to the ball of my foot enough to get a good push off. So essentially I’m running on my heels. He gave me a few pointers and also suggested I come check out Fleet Feet’s Good Form Running seminars.
Now on to the shoes. He had three pairs he brought out one from Mizuno, one from Saucony and the Nike Tirax 13‘s. I tired on all three pairs and took a walk around the store. Both the Mizuno and Saucony shoes felt more stiff than the Nike’s I’ve grown used to. Matt explained the make up of both the shoes saying that they used a type of denser rubber in the heels which was harder than the Nike foam. How ever he said performace-wise they were all about the same.
In my opinion you don’t fix whats not broken, so I went ahead and bought the Nike’s. They’re comfortable and I’m used to them so I went with what works for me.
Saturday morning I met up with my friend Beefy for the
Champions 10k at Montrose Harbor. It was a little damp and humid but the temps were great
I was giving my new Nike’s a test drive in some race conditions. Beef and I went off just after 9am we had a great pace at the beginning, but it wasn’t long before the humidity got involved. It got steamy. Our goal for this race was to run a comfortable pace and finish under 1:10. We kept and 11:00/mile pace and finished in 1:08. We hit our goal and chalked it up as a win, but ideally we were thinking 1:06 would have been nice. Here is the Garmin recap…
After the race I was off to Wrigley for the beginning of a roof top game/Bachelor party. Saturday was gonna be a long day. I had decided to pass on monitoring my caloric intake cause it wasn’t going to be good. A lot of beers and a couple of burgers later the Cubs won and we went bar hopping until about 5am Sunday morning. Uuuugh.
I went home and crashed for about three hours. But I got up cause we had stuff to do. Some of which just didn’t get done. Wetook care of some minor shopping
and then relaxed before going out for a nice hour and a half walk around Burnham Harbor.
By 7:00 I was done for. I passed out on the couch for a while before moving to bed and passing out there.
Overall the weekend was great, but I look forward to getting back in my usual routine.
Phil Castello 