Matt Gets Running

Today I bought new run­ning shoes. I figured it was about time.

I went into Moti on White­ladies Road, because they seemed quite friendly the last time I went in, and they were great. I basic­ally told them I was a begin­ner and threw myself on their mercy.

Help­ful sales guy checked out my feet and my old shoes, spot­ted slightly fallen arches and a tend­ency to over-pronate (which I’ve pre­vi­ously been told was a prob­lem by a podi­at­rist, too.)

Then I got to go on a tread­mill for the first time, which was a bit odd. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but once I’d got my head around run­ning without the rest of the world mov­ing back­wards, it was okay. And at least I didn’t fly off it into the shoe dis­play at any point.

After that, it was quite fun. Basic­ally we watched video of me run­ning on the tread­mill (just my legs and feet, luck­ily!), and he poin­ted out the angles that might be caus­ing me a prob­lem. Then he went to get four dif­fer­ent sets of shoes that should each fix the prob­lem, and I ran on the tread­mill in all of them to see which were best.

As well as check­ing them for com­fort, we watched them all side-by-side on the video thingy after each bit of jog­ging, so he could make sure they were work­ing okay for me.

They were all pretty comfy. In the end I nar­rowed it down to a pair of Nikes or a pair of Mizunos, and finally chose the Mizunos because they were just a touch lighter.

And I’m just back in from road-testing them with Week 6, Run 1! That felt easier than last time, but I don’t know whether that’s because this was three sep­ar­ate runs (5 mins, 8 mins, 5 mins) or because of the shoes, which should be help­ing with my form, as well as feel­ing more cushioned.

Either way, tomor­row will tell more than today, as it’s nor­mally the day after that my feet are sore. We’ll see. For now, I’ll just be happy that today’s 23 minutes of run­ning got me fur­ther down the towpath than I’ve ever been on the C25K…