Elka chewed through my beloved first pair of carbon plated running shoes yesterday. I reluctantly bought them last year before the Cherry Blossom because they are expensive and, yes, maybe I thought I was too slow to deserve them, but they are a dream to run in. The perform best for the first few hundred miles and they are like running with little trampolines in your shoes. But after the best spring-ing-ness faded, I still wore them for workouts and long runs for almost a year now thinking that they’d be gentler on my aging joints, holding off on buying my second pair until just a few weeks before my marathon this year.
I texted the destruction to Paul who told me to buy another pair immediately, haha. I do not track any equipment technology, I don’t really care about all the different brands of shoes or watches – this is Jeremy’s area of fun. Last year, all the carbon plates shoes were just that – carbon plated shoes. This year, they’ve realized people want to train in these shoes, so now the carbon plated shoes are themed, there are the daily trainer shoes and the racing shoes. So I bought the daily trainer shoes from New Balance arriving tomorrow. After I put the order in, I read some reviews and realized that they are so responsive and the stack height is so tall, that they are technically illegal to race in. So you know, if I place in the marathon, I’ll be disqualified. I have mixed feelings about this if I race in an illegal shoe even though, you know, I want to finish in 4.5 or 5 hours. This is the kind of terrible thing about a marathon – if you run faster, it’s over sooner and if you run slower, it just goes on for a million years.
My marriage to Jeremy has turned into just talking about two things: 1) training (biking and running) or 2) Pokemon Go. Jeremy told me last night about a study that shows that drafting will save you 6 minutes in a marathon. He said – no matter how fast or slow you go, it’ll save you 6 minutes. Drafting is really important in biking, but it’s less clear the advantage for running. Six minutes is a lot! But lots of people hate other random people running right behind them, maybe me included, but 6 minutes is nothing to sneeze at. It’s a lot of time. I’ll think about it.
