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Week 18
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Old Guy II, thanks for getting the week off. I'll go ahead and put a weekly demarcation in nonetheless. Good job on your XC race, and I hope your inflamed bursa is short-lived; can't say I have any experience in that regard, hopefully someone here can offer some useful suggestions.
I had another decent training week. My daily totals were 5,0,8,7.5,6.5,7.5,8 for a total of 42.5 miles. A little less than last week, as I had said I would, but also topped an hour of running twice during the week. First time of an hour continuous running in awhile....at least since early June, that is. Of the runs, Wednesday and Friday incorporated a bit of speed, as I repeated the .2 on, .2 off that I had done the previous week, then on Friday, I included an accelerated run, where I started at 7:50 for the first mile, and dropped 30-35s per mile for the next three miles, so the last mile was at 5:40; it felt really good to get back to something resembling 5k race pace. It has me thinking that I can go ahead and jump into a fall festival fun-run; I just love the Fall Festival Races: the festive atmosphere, the cool, dry air, the cider and music (Bluegrass around here) at the finish....just a lot of fun.
During the Friday cut-down run, I actually ran the miles in Nike Frees, not a shoe I usually run in, but I was surprised how much I liked them (this was on a track, so there weren't any stones to get caught in the tread). In the process it's got me thinking about shoes again. We had talked about shoes a year ago, but maybe it's time to see what people's racing and training "go-to" shoes are these days.
I have a low-volume foot with a high, collapsing arch and Morton's toe, and was diagnosed many years ago as needing support, so most of my training have been in shoes with some pronation control. I've whittled it down to the point where I run mostly in light-weight trainers like the DS-Trainer or the New Balance 905's. With the bum knee episode, I decided now would be a good time to focus on trying to strengthen my feet, so I bought the Nike Frees mostly to walk in. I can definitely tell that my feet have gotten stronger over the summer, and I'm now finding that I can do many of my runs without the pronation control, but am not too sure how minimal I want to go. However, I will do intervals in my racing flats, which have been Adidas Manas and Saucony Fastwitch up to this point.
Welcome to the threaed frets and Silverfox (and victoria b.c. canada runner and zero gravity that I didn't acknowledge last week), I hope that you can find good fellowship and useful training experiences from this thread.
Hope everyone is having a great week as we pass the autumnal equinox.