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Went for my scheduled 1 hour tempo run last night. The weather was perfect. Rene and my contractors are wrapping up and it was a pretty good day. My seasonal affect disorder (kidding) was in full swing with it being a nearly perfect weather day my mood matched. Legs felt good eventhough this is the 4th week of a build set, all is good. It was little windy but good.

Becuase I am trying to figure out what shoes are going to be my distance shoes (greater than 10 miles) I have a mental block that those shoes could actually be my vibram 5 fingers (that I have written about a lot). My other concern with that shoe is the time it will take in transition getting these things on.... so, I decided to run with another "barfoot" / "POSE" style shoe and those are my Mizuno Waves. I bought them last year for 30 bucks in a clearance bin at a local running store. They are about 1/2size too big but my goal was to have a set of POSE shoes for drilling. I never imagined that I would be logging serious miles one day. That day was yesterday.

In my quest to find a distnace shoe I put these on and took off. They are a great shoe, very flexible. My splits were 8.00/mile, 8:35/m, 8"41/m, 8:18 .... and all was good right up until then. I felt a hot spot on my left foot right near the ball of my foot. I was wearing tech socks but my feet had to be sliding in the shoes. The fact that it was at the ball of my foot I guess is a good thing becuase that indicates that is where I was landing (yeah) no problems in the heels or rear of my foot because to be honest, this part of my foot barely touched the ground. Anyway, it got to the point that I was in a lot of pain so I had a choice, really push to finish and face the consequences of blisters a less than two weeks from a race or finish reasonably and walk in. I chose the second path and avoided major blisters. My foot is a little sore today but today is a swim & bike day so that should be an issue for my run tomorrow (hopefully). Although I would love to get my tempo runs in the 7:xx/mile these runs in the 8:xx are great for me. They are faster than last year and I only hope to improve. No knee pain = speed so if I keep the knee pain away my running should continue to improve.

My shoe experiment continues and the Vibram's are still the the leaders. More to come on the shoe saga but every run helps to hone in on a solution.

All for now
Tracy Butler
www.acropolistech.com