New Trail Shoes Pass the Test!
Last week when she was in town, my Mom and I had some good mother-daughter time shoe-shopping.. for running shoes! We headed over to the Boulder Running Company, where they video-tape you running on a treadmill to assess the type of shoes you need. She got regular running shoes, and I took the opportunity to pick up some trail running shoes.
I’ve bought trail shoes a few times before, but invariably they end up hurting my feet and I abandon them. I always worried that I wasn’t getting trail shoes with enough support. As it turns out, I have a very neutral gait, so the actual problem may have been that I was picking shoes with too much support! I strayed from my beloved sauconys and picked up some brooks cascadia 4s. I was amazed by how light they felt: they were cushiony and comfortable.
Today I decided to take them out on their maiden voyage. We got a reported 8 inches of snow on Thursday, but only two days later much of it is melting. The sun was shining brightly so I headed out in shorts and a long-sleeved shirt. I ended up at South Valley Park (a park I haven’t run at before). I wanted to take my camera with me, but was worried about dropping it in the snow and slush.
The trail was a bit of a mess, but the sun was shining and it was a fantastic day for a run! As well, I wanted to really try out the new shoes! I scrambled over red dust and snow, in part amazed by how many other folks had already explored the trails since the recent snowfall.
While my shoes didn’t keep my feet dry, they certainly held up well on the run. My trail shoes in the past have left me with calluses on the side of my foot, and I felt great during and after the run. I will admit, every time I hit the trails in Colorado I feel completly humbled. THIS is some hard running!
I thought about a recent blog post when I wrote about time on my feet and Meredith claimed that speed was equally as important as time. As I struggled up 356ft and down 225ft in a single mile, I knew that this was significantly more of a workout than most any run I’d done on a flat surface!
When I run the trails here, I never really force myself into a certain time or distance: this helps alleviate some of the pressure, and brings the fun back into the run. I told myself 6 or 8 miles, or an hour, would be a good run. As a wound my way from trail to trail (I ran on the Coyote Song Trail, the Swallow trail, the Lyon’s back trail and the Columbine trail), I found myself nearing my car at 57 minutes, so I finished what I consider a great run of 5.25 miles.
Distance: 5.25 miles
Time: 57:35
Pace: 10:57
AvgHR: 158
MaxHR: 177
Ascent: 1069ft
Decent: 1113ft
The shoes passed the test and I got sufficiently muddy/slushy to consider this a successful trail run!
