I took my DW wife to the running store last Friday, in order to pick out a new pair of shoes.  Now, I suppoes that my intentions were twofold.  First I wanted her to get a good pair of shoes if she is going to start getting active again now that the baby is here.  Second, I wanted to look at new shoes (read: try out the Kinvara 2).

The guys at the store are awesome.  They runyou through all the normal tests, stand on each foot, walk back and forth, then recommend a shoe.  First, they grabbed her a pair of Adidas and had her move around in those.  After a few minutes, she told him what she felt in those and then he went to the back and worked his shoe finding magic, brought back 4 new pair.  She eventually narrowed it down to a pair of Sauconys and the Asics GT-2160.  After trying both shoes, she settled on the Asics. Thankfully she absolutely loves these shoes.  Now she just needs to go try them out before we set up a training plan for her. 

In the meantime, I asked to try on the Kinvara 2s.  Let me tell you,  I was so excited to try these bad boys on and take them for a test run.  So out of the store I went for a quick little lap.  They felt great, light and airy, like I could take off, fast.  But, there is almost always a but, they rubbed funny.  What is this, why do the tops of my feet hurt?  Nuts, these aren't going  to work for me.  I can't justify running shoes that rub my feet, no matter how light and airy they seem.  I was major bummed, becauase I was dreaming of these shoes.  Back into the store I went and told my sad story.  They brought out 4 more pair for me to try on.  I decidede on the Brooks Launch.  These are nice, light, but not as airy, shoes, that felt great on my feet.  I should have known, I love my other Brooks shoes.  My wife was impressed that I had the where-with-all to recognize a problem with the shoes, and not  be sold on their awesomeness.  Like I said, if I am going to run 400ish miles in them, they better fit right.  So with the purchase of new shoes in hand, I have officially retired my first pair of shoes, a pair of Adidas with 285 known miles on them.  They were starting to hurt my feet on even short runs.  The new shoes will Launch Tuesday, with and easy run (pun most definitely intended) before they take over interval/tempo runs. 

Speaking of intervals, Friday called for 12x400 with 2 minute recoveries.  The first 8 sets were awesome, the energy was there to lightly jog between each interval. But by set 9, I was drained.  Now the intervals themselves were are all run at roughly the same time, within three seconds of each other, but the final four sets I walked the recoveries so that I could push through.  The average for the intervals was an aweseom 1:34, the fastest being at 1:31 and the slowest at 1:38, a great little workout.

Now, for whatever reason, that great workout didn't translate to a great long run Sunday.  I am guessing that between the hard intervals, the early morning Thursday, or the DW reunion Saturday night, the long run wanted to kick my butt.  And it did, I had no desire to get out of bed, but the knowledge that my friend was going to meet me for 10 later drove me to get it started.  Needless to say, I awoke 30 minutes too late to get the 8 in before hand.  So I decided to try to get 16 in.  I got to the park at 6:40 and knew it was going to be tough.  A very slow 6 miles later, and I met my friend, wanting to stop, so it was good he was there.  We headed out for another 6, slowly, then passed the cars again on our way to finish out his 10 with another 4.  This 16 was bad, it was slow, it was long, it was tiring, to an already tired body.  It ended up being a 16.2 mile run in 2:47, eek.  That was 15 minutes worse than my last 16 mile run.  Oh well.  Sometimes you gotta prepay for that amazing run with a few bad ones. 

Pics of shoes will be up soon.

Have fun out there guys.