Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Easy 5 miler and new shoes

So, last night I impulsively bought a pair of Saucony Progrid Ride 2 running shoes online without every trying them on. I have wide feet, so it's not easy for me to find running shoes locally. I found this website, www.endless.com, that sells all kinds of brands of running shoes. They are having $25 off a purchase of $100 and FREE Overnight Shipping. What?? Free Overnight Shipping, you say?? That's right! I ordered these babies at 7:50 PM yesterday evening and they were on my front porch today. Now, that's awesome! What's even more awesome is they actually fit. I got a 6.5 wide and they fit. Felt pretty good. However, when I started running, I started having doubts. I started having little aches in my achilles area and in a muscle right above my right ankle. The funny feelings went away about 3 miles into my run and then I felt fine. I think I laced them too tight, too. They have lots of cushioning in the heel, but I'm not a heel striker. There wasn't as much flexibility in the mid/forefoot area, and that's wear I land when I run. I'm going to give these shoes a few more tries before I decide if I like them or not. If I decide not to keep them, I may end up selling them.

As for my run, it was great. I did 5 miles on the Kanawha Terrace. I'm already seeing the benefit from my slower paced 10 mile run Sunday, as my heart rate was a lot lower on this run than it usually is. It usually averages around 168, and this evening it was 153 at an 11:30-ish pace. I felt a lot better and didn't feel as drained afterwards. My goal is to get my HR under 150 on my easy runs and still run a decent pace. I have a tempo run scheduled for tomorrow and a 5k on Friday evening. I'm going to try to hit 27:30 on the 5k.

Running stats:
Total miles: 5.01
Pace: 11:34 min/mile
Time: 57:59
Ave HR: 153
Calories burned: 598

Next run: Thursday, 6 miles total, 4 miles @ 9:40
Total miles this week: 15

4 comments:

  1. Good Luck with the shoes! That is a good deal. I have never run on Sauconys...Heart rate watching, huh? I dont pretend to understand it all, but one thing i have learned is not to put too much stake on one day's workout and the resulting HR. Notice trends. Compare workouts on similar days of the week and with similar number of days off before. Or similar runs. But watching HR can be a huge help on long runs or hard runs to make sure you don't go too hard and really hurt recovery time.
    If you don;t like the shoes..well, welcome to the club. I have like 5 pair that I bought, ran in and just didn't like after a couple of runs. I send my shoes to a charity in Africa, which uses the shoes for runners over there.
    Good Luck!

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  2. Shoes are very difficult for me. I have returned them so often they know me at the running specific shoe store I go to. LOL! I am going to check out that site to see if they have mine b/c that is a great deal.

    Good job on that run! You are kicking butt!

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  3. You're braver than me! I am always too scared to buy big things like running shoes on without trying them on.

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  4. Thank you!!! You are too sweet.

    I REALLY need to get back in the swing of things. I'm going to wait a bit (to check the budget), but then I'm going to invest in a Forerunner. Hopefully something new to play with will motivate me to get out there and run! It will also be easier now that summer school is over, and I can run according to my own wake up time. Doing it at 5 am kinda sucks, but here in good ol' Texas, it's 100* by 9 am!! Ugh.

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