Shoe Issues

So, I may or may not have given myself a slight injury yesterday. It may or may not have been from a new pair of shoes that I was trying out. Or it may or may not have been that my old shoes really do need to get retired. Or was it because of my new regime of doing a few crazy jumps and hops after each run? 

I haven’t written about running in a while because I have been knocking out a few chapters of this friggin’ novel which has been the bane of my life for a while. But I won’t divert into my writing woes. 

Let me tell you about my running woes instead.

I had three half marathons booked for this year, with an aim to reduce my time for each one. ‘Aims’ are all well and good but if there is no plan in place to execute them then they may as well be called ‘wishes’ instead. The year started well enough with some written accounts of my intentions and accomplishments in the run up to my first half in Liverpool. The lead up wasn’t all plain sailing but I was quite pleased with the day itself. I had more strength and stamina in that Half Marathon than I have in a very long time, and I noticed the difference that consistent training gave me. 

This should then have enthused me to keep it going for the second half at the beginning of June, but the reality was that I was away a lot, doing a history tour in North Cyprus, walking the West Highland Way, and then getting my literary fix in Hay. And betwixt those long weeks, we were communing with the Bard in Stratford-upon-Avon.

So, I came back home from Hay-on-Wye, and two days later ran the Jubilee Bridge half in Runcorn/Widnes without much hope of accomplishing anything other than completing it. Which I did. Surprisingly, it was only a couple of minutes slower than Liverpool, and as this one was a tad hillier, I would say that I hadn’t lost too much fitness. It means, however, that my new aim – there is that word again – is to see if I can reach two hours and ten minutes on the clock at Warrington, in September instead of the two hours I had hoped to achieve.

Going to get a little nerdy here but bear with me: 

First of all, I do need a new pair of shoes. And I want a shoe that lasts a long time. Those few iterations of Brooks Ghost that I have had are not called work horses for nothing. They’re not super shoes; they’re not minimalist shoes, but I’ve never lost a toenail or had a blister in them, and they really do last. 

I haven’t tried a super shoe. Part of me thinks that if I do, and I love them then I’ll throw away my principles of wearing a slightly more sustainable product and building up my own physical ability, out of the window as I’m not that much of a saint, so for now, I’m closing the door on them.

The new shoes I did buy were Brooks Hyperion (not the Elite and not the Hyperion 2), to play with the idea of going a bit more minimalist. It has a lower heel drop than the Ghost, which means that it is closer to the ground. It is certainly a lot lighter than the Ghost, and I can tell that it feels a little bit different, even though I am a mid-foot striker. 

Yesterday, an hour or so after doing a little three-miler in them, I could feel a bit of a stabbing pain in the back of my right calf. Today, that pain’s gone, but I do know that for the past few weeks I’ve had a low-level Achilles thing going on with my normal shoes – which means that they must finally go, probably to somewhere like JogOn, as I have enough gardening shoes. 

I will keep trying these new Hyperions for short distances, and I still have one more pair of Ghost 14s that have only done two hundred miles. There is no longer a running shoe shop on the Wirral to try new models out, so if anybody has any ideas for my next work horse, please let me know.

The next thing I need to do is get accountable again, so my training diaries will happen at the end of each week, as that worked well in the first part of the year. And I will also include the number of jumps and hops I complete.