It's been some time since I felt up to recording much about my running.  It just hasn't been the same since I started back up after the Canada Army Half-marathon.  I kept waiting for things to become more familiar, because that's what I wanted to write about.  It still hasn't happened, but I could not ignore this journal any longer.  It's like ( Read more... )

A lot has happened since the last time I actually wrote up something here. Time for reflection has been scarce, even time for training got tight, but I made it to Race Day and enjoyed it in spite of all the obstacles that cropped up this summer. It certainly wasn't the summer I'd originally envisioned as I finished up the marathon in May and ( Read more... )

We have a winner in the Great Battle of the Treadmill! I returned to Solefit with four contenders carefully selected from the initial list suggested after my previous visit. The majority were neutral shoes, with only one pair of mild motion control if I needed some contrast. Brooks went unrepresented, as they have apparently changed the ( Read more... )

I will not be training with a clinic this summer. It's a decision I initially made last summer, after the low turnout made it impossible for me to train with anyone. I further developed the idea this spring, when I could see that the clinic system was no longer helping me improve all that much. My next step was going to be to personalize my ( Read more... )

The last few weeks have been very stressful. I have managed to complete all my training sessions, but the judgement call I had to make regarding my shoe situation was a very rough hurdle to overcome. After my last post I immediately set aside the older model of Axioms, but that was the easy part. Much harder was figuring out, for certain, if I ( Read more... )

My feet have been speaking to me a lot in the last few months.  Unfortunately, their message is too simple: they are feeling pretty beat up.  I don't remember getting this level of complaint from them last year, so I have to conclude that something is not going as well this year.  But I am stuck with a guessing game to  figure out what is the root ( Read more... )

A little-known fact about me is that I took classical ballet lessons as a child, before I got into running. It formed the basis of my physical capabilities, helping me develop balance and coordination, as well as being responsible for the development of the leg power necessary for when I first started competing in cross-country running. Leaping ( Read more... )

In printing out copies for someone of my entries here over the past summer, I noticed a disturbing trend. Just flipping through my current mood rankings makes it seem like this training cycle hasn't been going very well. It went from "determined" to "lonely" to "frustrated", just looking at the entries relating directly to my training at those ( Read more... )

According to my body, it's time to slow it down a notch and focus on the important things. That's the message I'm going to take with me from the suffering of this past weekend. A combination of factors led to my lower back getting strained. Evil footwear (aka high heels) would have to be considered the obvious culprit as I was trying to break in ( Read more... )

Sorry for the delay on writing this, but since the subject matter spilled beyond the close of the holidays, and I got hit with work and stress when I returned to work (no surprise there), I'm just going to try to capture the experiences as best I can recall. So, if it's a bit glossed over, and not as raw as it initially was, well, them's the ( Read more... )