A lesson in Shoes

Okay, a couple of weeks ago I decided to try a new kind of shoe. I decided to give Brooks shoes a try as the shoes that I use for my long runs. I bought a pair of Brooks Adreneline 7's and headed out for a 14km steady run. My knees started to hurt around the 8km mark and continued to hurt for the remainder of the run. Afterwards, I thought that my knees hurt because I was in new shoes and it takes time to "break-in" the new shoes to my running style and needs. So on Sunday I decided to give them another try. I headed out for my LSD run and my knees and calf began to hurt around the 16km mark and throughout the rest of the run. What was worse, I had a lot of discomfort the following day and week to follow. It turns out that the shoes that I normally wear are medial posted with stability control that comes later in my foot strike. The shoes that I tried out had an additional amount of medial support and had an extra support in the heel (heel-posted) to allow for pronation control on heel strike. I don't need this extra movement and it was causing problems all the way up my leg. Upon switching back to my old shoes and then to a new pair of the same model shoe, the discomfort went away and my running is back to normal.

My current crop of shoes that I have on the go:

• Asics 2120 X 2: Long runs, Steady runs.
• Asics DS trainers: Races, Marathons.
• Brooks Axiom 2's: Track work and Tempo runs.
• Brooks Cascadia: Trail runs and races.
• Brooks Mach 5's: Short fun trail sprints and White Hunter/Black heart training (Dump Hill Repeats).

Fortunately, the wonderful people at Running Free were gracious enough to take the shoes back as an exchange (since they were very clean and showed very little abrasion/wear. Normally, the policy is to not take returns on shoes that have been run in, but to give a deeper discount on a replacement pair of shoes. I guess Karma was on my side this time.

Only 20 more days until Scotia.