Matt Gets Running

My plan to get back to run­ning three times a week, to help me recover some fit­ness before the Bris­tol 10K, seems to be start­ing off okay. I fol­lowed up Monday’s run with another run today, so that’s my two week­day runs done. I’ll get some­thing a bit longer in at the weekend.

Today’s run was a bit of a trial at the start. It was just a simple 5K down the Port­way. But I wasn’t sure I was going to make it to the first kilo­metre as I set out, mostly because the weather was hor­rible. Our brief burst of summer-like spring seems to be over, with a typ­ic­ally Brit­ish cold snap.

It wasn’t snow­ing in Bris­tol, but my walk­ing warm-up was done into a freez­ing cold wind that nearly sapped my strength before I star­ted off. On the plus side, I couldn’t wait to get run­ning, just to warm up…

Before the first kilo­metre was over, though, I was still freez­ing. The thought even crossed my mind to stop for shel­ter for a bit at the tun­nel under­neath the Sus­pen­sion Bridge, and then decide whether I just wanted to run back home. Before bits of me star­ted fall­ing off.

I star­ted to warm up even­tu­ally, though, and pushed on to the full 5K. The few other soaked and frozen jog­gers that I met all gave that slightly wry acknow­ledge­ment that says, “Oh, so you’re an idiot, too, are you? Well done, idiot.”

And the good news is that it was five whole minutes faster than Monday’s 5K, mostly because of my desire to get warm as quickly as I could by push­ing harder than usual at the begin­ning. So, throw­ing myself out there into the freez­ing wind and rain turned out quite well. Even though, dur­ing the first kilo­metre, it seemed like a bloody silly idea…

I’m a 3 cus­tomer. In fact, I just used my 3 MiFi dongle to start writ­ing this blog post in the “cloud”, from my comfy spot in Boston Tea Party in Clifton Vil­lage. I’ve been using 3 for mobile inter­net for years, and I find them a lot more reli­able than cafe Wi-Fi. And their cus­tomer ser­vice has been good, too.

So, when 3’s agency got in touch and wondered if I’d like to review any­thing running-related from the iPhone sec­tion of the 3 store, I couldn’t see any reason why not.

I chose this Jabra Rhythm head­set. Run­ning is hard on head­phones and ear­buds. They’re at risk from rain, sweat and repet­it­ive strain on the cable, among other things. I’ve got through sev­eral pairs since I star­ted jog­ging, so it’s always good to try out some­thing new and see if I can put another option on my list.

The Jab­ras are my pre­ferred type of head­phones, noise-isolating ear­buds. These also fea­ture an iPhone– and Android-compatible remote con­trol and microphone.

They arrived in a dis­tinct­ive tube with the ear­buds inser­ted into trans­lu­cent plastic ears. I put them to one side rather than throw­ing them away; you never know when you’ll need a pair of trans­lu­cent plastic ears.

First Impres­sions

The Jab­ras look good, and the plastics are a decent qual­ity. The lead is nice and long, with a gold-plated 3.5mm jack. They cer­tainly feel bet­ter in the hand than the stand­ard Apple head­phones that come with the iPhone, though not as good as my cur­rent head­phones, the Sen­nhe­iser MM70. But given that the Jab­ras are £25 and the Sen­nhe­isers are £50, that’s hardly a surprise.

The soft rub­ber ear­buds come in the stand­ard three sizes. Luck­ily my ears are appar­ently aver­age, so I never have to fiddle with the small and large pairs that come with this style of ear­bud. The Jab­ras fit­ted snugly and comfortably.

The micro­phone and remote con­trol drop from the left-hand ear­bud, just like my Sen­nhe­isers, so even if the ear­buds weren’t obviously-shaped, I could still eas­ily tell the left from the right. The sup­plied clip grips clothes and cable fine.

The gold-plated 3.5mm jack looks nice, emblazoned with the Jabra name, though I’m not con­vinced that the cable’s strain relief is going to be effective.

One oddity was the adapter that came in the tube. It’s lis­ted on the pack­aging itself as a “phone adapter”, but it’s not men­tioned in the paper instruc­tion sheets. Its plug is identical to the plug that’s already on the end of the cable.

The head­phones didn’t need this adapter to work on my iPhone 3GS or my (Android) Sam­sung Galaxy S Wi-Fi – everything, includ­ing the remote con­trol and the micro­phone, seemed to work just fine without it. Which is a good thing, as stack­ing the plug and the adapter makes for an ungainly and fragile-looking con­nec­tion that might eas­ily bend or snap in a pocket.

Sound

Being called “Jabra Rhythm”, I was expect­ing the Jab­ras to be a bit bass-heavy. There’s a big mar­ket out there for people who live in the bass end of their pre­ferred music’s fre­quen­cies, and a lot of head­phones are aimed squarely at them.

The Jab­ras didn’t fail to dis­ap­point on that score, emphas­ising the bass end far more than my pre­ferred Sen­nhe­isers. I won’t knock them for that per se; that’s more a ques­tion of taste than qual­ity, and the rest of the sound was well-reproduced, with a detailed top end, to my inex­pert ears, at least. I’ve cer­tainly listened to £25 head­phones that soun­ded a lot worse.

Since I’ve given up my com­mute to work, jog­ging is one of my chances to catch up on my back­log of spoken word pod­casts, too (my long run of the week is often accom­pan­ied by Build and Ana­lyse.) The Jab­ras were good for the spoken word; voices soun­ded rich and clear.

The noise isol­a­tion buds are comfy, and work just as well as the ones on my Sen­nhe­isers. They pick up some phys­ical cable noise, but no more than any other sim­ilar ear­buds I’ve tried.

Remote Con­trol

One big dis­ap­point­ment is the lack of volume con­trol. The remote con­trol is a single but­ton with the play/pause/next track/answer calls/etc. func­tion of the middle but­ton on stand­ard Apple head­phones. This single, mul­ti­func­tion but­ton works great on the Jab­ras, with a nice pos­it­ive click, but they lack the volume up/down buttons.

This is a real loss for run­ners, as run­ning is one of those activ­it­ies where it’s tough to reach the volume con­trol but­tons on the music player itself, which is likely in an arm­band or a tight-fitting shorts pocket, or an audio waist pack, or what-have-you.

Micro­phone

One vaunted fea­ture of the Jab­ras – and pre­sum­ably a reason that a phone com­pany like 3 sells them – is the micro­phone. This has “wind-noise reduc­tion” tech­no­logy built in.

There’s a really good way to test a microphone’s wind-noise reduc­tion around here, and that’s to take it for a jog down the open ground of the A4 Port­way, by the River Avon. That has the bonus of adding road noise into the mix, too.

So, on my jog last Wed­nes­day, I took along the Apple ear­buds that came with my phone, my favoured Sen­nhe­isers, and the Jab­ras. I spun the record­ings into an Audioboo so that you could com­pare all three. Incid­ent­ally, if you think you have prob­lems untangling your head­phones, try untangling three dif­fer­ent pairs that have been stirred in a jogger’s pocket for ten minutes. Not fun.

(If you want to skip the intro, the record­ings of the three head­phones start at 50 seconds in:)

The crunch­ing sound from the Apple head­phones is them bash­ing around, unse­cured by a clip. They don’t sound bad, but they don’t sound good.

The Sen­nhe­isers did bet­ter, with less rub­bing noise, and the voice punch­ing through more clearly through the background.

The Jab­ras, how­ever, were pretty bad. Muffled, with a lot of obvi­ous wind noise. My voice didn’t come through any­thing like as crisply as it did with either the Apple ear­buds or the Sennheisers.

That’s a real shame, espe­cially when the micro­phone is a import­ant selling fea­ture of the phone (“For Music and Calls”, it says on the tube.)

This isn’t a big loss for me, mind you. I’m never going to be that guy jog­ging along in the Apple adverts, adding “to-do” items to his task-list with Siri as he goes. I’m self-conscious about talk­ing to myself in pub­lic, plus I don’t nor­mally have enough breath or con­cen­tra­tion to jog and talk at the same time.

But if you bought the Jabra Rhythms to take advant­age of their call qual­ity, I think you’d be pretty disappointed.

Ver­dict

Pros:

• Good qual­ity mater­i­als for the money.
• Good sound repro­duc­tion, though a little bassy for my taste.
• Gen­er­ous cord length.

Cons:

• No volume controls.
• Poor micro­phone.
• “Head­phone adapter”, whatever it’s for. If you need to use it, you won’t like it. And it could do with a men­tion in the instructions.

I’d have liked these head­phones much more if they’d spent the money sucked up by the wind-noise reduc­tion tech­no­logy on fit­ting them with volume but­tons instead. At £25 they’d have been a tempt­ing option com­pared to spend­ing twice as much on another pair of Sen­nhe­isers when my cur­rent set die. But without the volume con­trols, they’re noth­ing like as jogger-friendly.

That said, the Jabra Rhythm head­phones aren’t bad. They seem well put-together, and they sound fine, espe­cially for speech and music from the dan­cier end of the spec­trum. But the micro­phone is poor, so don’t buy them if you want to make calls from them, espe­cially not while jog­ging down the Port­way in Bristol.

Full dis­clos­ure: I reviewed the Jabra Rhythm head­set after being sent it, for free, by 3’s media agency. No con­di­tions were attached apart from a link to the 3 store appear­ing in the review. 3 didn’t pay me to say nice things about them in passing, either

I approached this year’s Bath Half Mara­thon with more than a little trep­id­a­tion, and rightly so, it turned out. Since the Bris­tol Half, I just haven’t trained enough. Partly that’s due to winter, and partly because my routine’s been knocked off-kilter by quit­ting my day job. I also put on some weight over the last half of 2011 that I’ve not man­aged to shake off yet.

I mused on this dur­ing the approach to Bath, in a coach from Bath Race­course. I really recom­mend their Bath Half park-and-ride ser­vice, by the way. You park at the race­course, then wait in a nice warm room with a bunch of other run­ners (and decent toi­let facil­it­ies – very import­ant before a race!), then get taken into town in a nice coach. The shuttle ser­vice back after the race runs until 5pm, and it was only £9 includ­ing the book­ing fee.

Any­way. Yes, I was under­prepared. The longest dis­tance I’ve done since Septem­ber was 10km, and that’s just not enough dis­tance train­ing for a half marathon.

On the other hand, everything else was going well. I’d made sure to eat right and get enough sleep for the few days before the race, and I woke up feel­ing refreshed and pretty cheer­ful on Sunday morn­ing. On the way to the start, the weather seemed ideal for run­ning, cold and over­cast, but not too cold. Also, because this was my second Bath Half, I knew a lot more about what to expect, from where to find the Runner’s Vil­lage to the course itself.

Stand­ing in the long queue for the start line, there was the usual chit-chat with other run­ners. The nerves of start­ing and a shared pur­pose mean that people are happy to nat­ter to com­plete strangers and com­pare exper­i­ences. I for­got about my lack of train­ing, and just got into the run­ning mood.

And that was the way I stayed, for the first lap, at least. The grey skies lif­ted and the sun came out, which is good spir­itu­ally, but not ideal for run­ning – a lot of people I’ve spoken to since said it was too hot for them, and I agree. I was feel­ing dis­tinctly over­heated by the sixth or sev­enth mile, and start­ing to lose some of my chipperness.

That said, the friend­li­ness of the Bath Half course did a lot to keep me buoyed up. The rock band out on the pave­ment, the people cheer­ing from win­dows, the drum­mers in Queen Square – all great for keep­ing you going.

But, sadly, with my lack of train­ing, some­thing had to give. Loop­ing back past the start to begin my second lap of the course, I was already feel­ing like I’d run out of steam, phys­ic­ally at least. My feet were start­ing to feel sore (I ended up with some nice blisters), the heat was get­ting to me, and my muscles were run­ning on empty.

Neither plenty of water nor the gel food thingy I ate helped much. I was tired, and get­ting more tired by the mile.

Time to start run­ning on sheer bloody-mindedness, then. I con­cen­trated on put­ting one foot in front of the other, and keep­ing up a jog of some kind. It didn’t mat­ter what kind, or how fast, as long as I kept up some­thing that looked and felt like run­ning rather than walking.

And I car­ried on. I got slower as the miles went on, as you can clearly see in my Run­Keeper track, and I wasn’t enjoy­ing myself much, but I tried to keep my mind off that as best as I could. I thought of other things, I coun­ted how many times I passed the bleach-blonde woman who was altern­at­ing walk­ing and run­ning, I enjoyed the com­edy outfits.

The safari team who (by dint of clever cos­tumery) included one mem­ber being car­ried in a cage by a gor­illa got my “cos­tume of the race” award, by the way.

And, even­tu­ally, I made it to a point where there were only five kilo­metres to go. That was an import­ant psy­cho­lo­gical point, because I can always run 5K. 5K is my default dis­tance. 5K is the dis­tance I’d run in my sleep, were I prone to somnambulation.

In the last couple of miles before the fin­ish line, you start to get more per­sonal encour­age­ment, too, espe­cially if you’re back with the rest of the strag­gling, thinned-out crowd. “Just two miles to go now!” wasn’t too help­ful, as two miles soun­ded like a hell of a long way, but the reg­u­lar “Keep going!”s and “You’re doing great!”s were welcome.

As were the “It’s just around the corner now!”s (which star­ted, truth be told, about a mile away from the final corner, but hey.) Once I was on “final approach” I knew I was going to make it without walk­ing, and I just kept plod­ding on.

In the end, I crossed the fin­ish line over­heated, astound­ingly tired, and with very sore feet, at 2:58:44. That’s a whole ten minutes slower than I man­aged the Bris­tol Half, and pretty disappointing.

On the other hand, I was bloody happy to have not given up, and I still felt like I’d accom­plished some­thing, once I’d recovered a little. I did it. I jogged all the way around, albeit slowly, and at least I came in under the three-hour mark.

So. Another medal, and another finisher’s t-shirt that doesn’t fit (one size for every­one this year, Bath Half? Really? But I for­give you, because you were really well-organised and because you have more toi­lets than the Bris­tol Half.)

It’s also, so far, £126 plus Gift Aid raised for Bris­tol Mind. Look­ing back over my past Just Giv­ing dona­tions – which have all been for run­ning – that means I’ve now raised well over £1,000 for char­ity by get­ting out there and hit­ting the streets. Thanks, all my lovely spon­sors, for giv­ing to good causes for the Bath Half, for all my past races, and, hope­fully, for races to come…

Gear

I’m pre­pared for the morn­ing. I thought a glimpse into the array of stuff I’m drag­ging along with me might be inter­est­ing, espe­cially for those who’ve never raced. So, from roughly left-to-right, top-to-bottom:

• Clothes, includ­ing:
  • Shorts, a little on the large side. But bet­ter than run­ning in the now-quite-clapped-out pair I’ve been run­ning in since I star­ted run­ning. One day I’ll find another pair of run­ning shorts that fits me and has pock­ets, damn it.
  • Race shirt, with num­ber already attached, and the form on the back (next of kin, so forth) all filled out.
  • X-Socks, tech­nical run­ning socks, with nice soft non-rubby patches in all the right places.
  • Dis­pos­able top-shirt. At the Bath Half, they col­lect and recycle cloth­ing dis­carded just before the start line, so you can keep warm until the race starts by wear­ing an old top.
  • Pants. Just ordin­ary boxer/trunk style things; I’ve heard people object to cotton-based under­wear for run­ning, but spe­cial­ist run­ning undies are (a) expens­ive, and (b) unlikely to come in my size.
• Light run­ning hat with a big peak to keep off rain and shade my eyes. This will fit in a pocket if I don’t want to wear it all the way round.
• Garmin Fore­Run­ner GPS watch, charged. Much longer bat­tery life and gen­er­ally more reli­able than an iPhone app for GPS tracking.
• Little Sony camera.
• Con­tact lenses. I gen­er­ally only wear con­tacts for exer­cise. I’ll put them in before I set off in the morn­ing and leave the case at home.
• Sunglasses, because it looks like it’s going to be a pretty nice day tomor­row. If it’s not, I’ll just hang them off the neck of the shirt.
• Money, for (a) emer­gen­cies, and (b) grabbing a cel­eb­rat­ory post-run milk­shake, or whatever.
• The min­imum of car and house keys that I’ll need.
• Dir­ec­tions and ticket to the park­ing (I’m park­ing at Bath Race­course and tak­ing a shuttle bus in. It was a good ser­vice last year, and I’m very happy to use it again.)
• Race inform­a­tion leaf­let. Nice and pock­et­able this year.
• Lanacane anti-chafing gel. I will be put­ting this in sev­eral places, includ­ing on my feet to help pre­vent blisters. You prob­ably do not want the details of where else I put it. I won’t take the tube with me, just apply it before I get dressed.
• Paink­illers, just in case.
• Spare safety pins. Handy if a zip or fasten­ing goes on anything.
• Chap stick
• Two small, round plasters. One per nipple. If you’re won­der­ing why, you may want to check out the “nipple shots” post from 2010’s Bris­tol Half Mara­thon, for example. As you can see, this is even a danger for skinny men. As a fat bloke who runs, I take no chances.
• Phone. You can’t wear head­phones on the Bath Half (being a two-lap race means there’s always a danger of faster run­ners com­ing up unex­pec­tedly behind you, for starters) so this isn’t for music, more for tweet­ing before and after, and emergencies.
• (Next row) Energy gels. Des­pite the face I didn’t like the taste of the ones I’ve tried in the past, I found that more food-like stuff (flapjack-style bars, etc.) weighed my stom­ach down while not doing any appar­ent good for my energy levels in pre­vi­ous runs. So, I’m try­ing them again, but a dif­fer­ent brand. I was only going to buy the Mule brand one, but then I noticed that the other one was rhu­barb and cus­tard fla­vour and I couldn’t res­ist it. I’ll prob­ably only take one tomor­row, depend­ing on how much pocket space I’ve got.

  UPDATE: This stuff really did taste like rhu­barb and cus­tard. Recommended!

• Kit­chen towel. For gen­eral use, and as emer­gency toi­let paper. The loos at races often run out of paper quite quickly.
• Shoes, with the tim­ing chip already fastened on.
• Water bottle, because I nor­mally run with a water bottle and it feels strange not to have it on a race, even though there are plenty of drink stations.
• Nuun “tri­berry” hydra­tion tab­lets. I’ll drop half of one of these into the water bottle when I fill it, then leave the rest at home.
• Bum bag. Sorry, I mean “Nike Audio Waist­pack”. This will hold much of the little loose stuff, the rest will go in the pock­ets of my shorts.

If I took more stuff with me, I’d have to leave a bag in the secure area at the race vil­lage. Trav­el­ling “light” saves me queueing for that before and after the race. I could prob­ably take less stuff, but this lot doesn’t weigh me down too badly, and I’d rather have some­thing and not want it than the other way around.
I don’t think there’s any­thing I’ve missed. If you run, what do you take to a race?

I’m in two minds as to whether to run tomor­row. I should prob­ably do a last bit of prac­tice for the Bath Half — I haven’t run more than 10km in ages.

On the other hand, my right ankle is feel­ing quite odd at the moment. It’s pos­sible I did some­thing to it yes­ter­day, when I fool­ishly accom­pan­ied the five-year-old whose birth­day party I was at into the clambering-around-rigging-and-dropping-through-pipes bit of the soft play centre we were at.

It’s not feel­ing too pain­ful, but it does feel like I’ve done some­thing to it such that it might be bet­ter left alone, rather than have me put 10km+ on it tomor­row morn­ing the week before an organ­ised race I’m signed up for. Hrm.

Think I’ll just see how I feel in the morn­ing. In the mean­time, if you’d like to spon­sor me and my odd-feeling ankle for the Bath Half, my Just Giv­ing page is here. This time I’m run­ning for Bris­tol Mind.

The week­end before last, I ran 10K. Last week­end, I ran 7K through rain and mud to review those Adi­das shoes. Both runs involved climb­ing from river level up to above the height of the Sus­pen­sion Bridge.

Today, I looked out of the win­dow at the spring sun­shine, and decided to give myself a break. So I just did a quick 5K along the towpath. Some­times, it’s nice just to go for a little jog! I might get out for some­thing longer dur­ing the week.

Last Sat­urday, I thought about jog­ging, looked out of the win­dow, and saw it was rain­ing. Then I went out any­way, because it was a good chance to test out my new Adi­das trail shoes.

New Adi­das shoes? Didn’t you just buy a pair of Mizunos, Matt? Yup. But Sports Direct’s media agency (hi, Lucie!) had seen that I was look­ing for new shoes, and offered to send me a free pair, in exchange for a (free-from-editorial-influence, hon­est) review.

Head­ing to Sports Direct’s run­ning shoes sec­tion, my first reac­tion was choice para­lysis. Four hun­dred plus pairs of men’s run­ning shoes. And, sadly, no indic­a­tion of which ones might suit people with flat, wide feet and a tend­ency to over-pronate.

So, there’s my first obser­va­tion — don’t buy shoes from the web unless you’ve already been to a good run­ning shoe shop in per­son and found out what you actu­ally need. And bought at least your first pair of shoes from them; fair’s fair. Take it from someone who’s suffered from plantar fas­ciitis, you want to make sure you’re wear­ing the right shoes.

I decided on trail shoes because they’d just get occa­sional use, and I’ve heard there’s less need for motion con­trol when you run on uneven ground. Plus it gave me the chance to try some­thing quite dif­fer­ent from my nor­mal shoes.

Over­com­ing my para­lysis, I opted for the Adi­das Kana­dia 4. Aggress­ively styled in red, black and orange, the bobbles of their “TRAXION” soles make it very appar­ent that the Kana­dias are designed a muddy hill rather than a smooth pave­ment. Def­in­itely more showy than I’d nor­mally go for, but quite fun to look at, I thought, as I took them out of the box.

Try­ing them on, I was dis­con­cer­ted by how small the Kana­dias felt on my feet. My every­day shoes are an 8, so I’d have thought a 9 would’ve been big enough, length-wise, at least. These felt bor­der­line, espe­cially on the right foot.

Look­ing around the web, I see warn­ings from a shoe shop, and sev­eral of the reviews on the Adi­das site and on wiggle.co.uk that these shoes seem under­sized. Adi­das, that’s really not very clever, espe­cially when so many people are shop­ping on the web.

Still, I couldn’t tell for sure if they were actu­ally too small, or just feel­ing a bit con­strict­ive com­pared to my Mizunos, so I figured I’d take them out for a test run. I had noth­ing to lose, after all.

The Kana­dias were inter­est­ing dur­ing my urban warm-up (the grass and mud only starts about a half-mile from my house on my nor­mal routes.) They were skit­tish on my stone front steps, but calmed down out on pave­ment and tar­mac. You could def­in­itely tell those bobbles were there on the soles. It was remin­is­cent of being on moun­tain bike tyres on a nor­mal road. Com­fort­able and safe, and fine to run in, but obvi­ously not mov­ing on the sur­face they were designed for.

They cheered up once I hit the south side of the Avon and got off the tar­mac. I took a few short­cuts across wet, muddy grass to try them out, and felt very sure-footed. The Kana­dias held my feet well, with very little move­ment around the ankle.

Then onto the next test — the towpath puddles. After a decent amount of rain, the towpath ends up with plenty of pretty much unavoid­able puddles, stand­ing water from side to side across the path, sev­eral strides long.

There are a couple of approaches to design­ing run­ning shoes for water incur­sion. One approach is to try to water­proof the shoes, and maybe add some styl­ish run­ning gaiters. I’ve heard that it’s hard to make this approach effect­ive and non-overheating, no mat­ter how “breath­able” your water­proof membrane.

The other approach is, lit­er­ally, to suck it up. Accept that fact that you’re going to get water in your shoes, and deal with it, by using mater­i­als that wick it away as best they can, and don’t start rub­bing badly when they get wet. This is the approach the Kana­dias take, and it seems to work pretty well, as I found out after about the fifth large towpath puddle.

Yes, my feet got cold and wet when I splashed through a puddle, but they warmed up pretty quickly again after­wards (helped by my X-Socks, too, I’m sure.) After their soak­ing, the shoes still felt pretty com­fort­able, and there wasn’t a big increase in weight.

Out of the grav­elly towpath and into the mud of Leigh Woods, and the Kana­dias really came into their own. Up steep hills, through slip­pery grass, plod­ding through mud and on gravel paths, I stayed secure. On my last Leigh Woods run, I’d noted my Mizunos slid­ing around at the boggy start of one of the paths; in the same spot the Kana­dias gripped well and I felt much more stable. The shoes also kept their bounce, des­pite being pretty soggy, and there was no sen­sa­tion of any rub­bing that might have led to a blister.

Finally I broke out of the woods and back onto tar­mac for the cool-down jog to Clifton Vil­lage, back to the slightly “moun­tain bike tyre” feel­ing, but per­fectly reas­on­able to run in. The only place I had prob­lems again was on the wet pav­ing stones of the hill back down to Hot­wells. There the Kana­dias felt slippy and slidey again; not deadly, but enough to make me want to take extra care.

On the down­hill stretch, I also felt my toes push­ing up against the front of the shoe, remind­ing me that the Adi­das siz­ing was a bit screwy. Pre­sum­ably I’d be bet­ter off in a size 10. But that would be the first size 10 shoe I’d ever owned, so I’d con­clude that Adi­das def­in­itely have got their size wrong on the Kanadias.

Which is a shame. Because — even though the “mud-release sur­face” of the “TRAXION” soles really did work, leav­ing the under­neath of the Kana­dias sur­pris­ingly clean by the time I got home — you really can’t return a pair of trail shoes after you’ve given them a proper test. Because they look like this.

Over­all, I like the Kana­dias. They look good, they’re very grippy on the trail, they cope well with being water­logged, and the mud-release soles do just what they say. I’ll def­in­itely be try­ing them out some more, espe­cially when I’m head­ing fairly dir­ectly for mud, grass and gravel.

But if you want to give them a try, I’d recom­mend start­ing in a pair one size big­ger than you’d expect.

Thanks, Sports Dir­ect, for giv­ing me a chance to try them out!

Full dis­clos­ure: I reviewed the Kana­dia 4’s after being given a choice of any sub-£50 run­ning shoe from Sports Dir­ect, for free. No con­di­tions were attached apart from a link to their run­ning shoes sec­tion appear­ing in my review, which seemed fair enough.

On Sunday, I felt pretty good, and the weather wasn’t quite as damn cold as it had been on Sat­urday, so I set out to do a respect­able dis­tance. I did my first 10K train­ing jog the year, though Leigh Woods (hand­ily, my nor­mal Leigh Woods route plus a loop of the “purple path” works out as pretty much exactly 10K.)

It wasn’t fast, and I had to stop for a minute or two to get my breath back halfway through the really steep bit, but it was pleas­ant and I felt pretty good all the way round. It’s nice to run through the woods at this time of year, though it’ll get even nicer as we head into spring.

I also made sure I took a route through some of the mud­dier, more slip­pery bits of the woods, so I could see how well my shoes gripped and how easy it was to run in them. I did that for a very par­tic­u­lar reason, which will hope­fully be revealed later in the week

It has been pretty nippy in Bris­tol recently, though we escaped the blanket of snow that covered the major­ity of the coun­try last week. It’s 2C out­side right now, in the middle of the day, and I was told that there’s more cold weather on the way.

I took advant­age of a slight gap in the weather on Sunday to wander out for a quick jog in my new shoes.

I didn’t go very far — after all, the last time I went run­ning in a new model of Mizuno Wave Inspires, they gave me a blister, and I ended up limp­ing home from Leigh Woods. So, learn­ing from my mis­take, I did a 5K that didn’t take me too far from home.

As it turned out, the Mizuno Wave Inspire 8s feel far nicer than the 7s did, and I agree with the nice man in Moti that they seem to be a return to the Wave Inspire’s pre­vi­ous good form. So, hope­fully that’ll add some extra encour­age­ment to get out and run, even if it is a bit nippy…

My admir­ing hordes (hello, Mar­garet!) have been won­der­ing whether I made it out for my fourth “res­ol­u­tion” run of Janu­ary, and the answer is a resound­ing “yes”.

I didn’t enjoy the first kilo­metre of Friday’s run, des­pite it being a nice day. I hadn’t slept that well, and I wasn’t really in the mood for run­ning. Nev­er­the­less, I plugged away down the towpath, turned into Leigh Woods at the far end, climbed the steep hill without too much ado, albeit very slowly, and kept going until I was nearly back at the Sus­pen­sion Bridge.

I stopped at 7km, mak­ing it my longest run of the year so far. Doesn’t seem bad for a day where I wasn’t really feel­ing it.

It’s been rain­ing a bit recently, which tends to flood sec­tions of the towpath. When I got back home, my shoes looked like this:

…and that made me con­sider buy­ing a new pair.

Sadly, these Mizuno Wave Inspire 7s have been, well, a bit rub­bish. I had trouble buy­ing a pair at all, then I had to send the first pair back because they gave me a blister, and I’ve never felt that great in the replace­ments. Which was a shame, after the Wave Inspire 5s and 6s were so good for me.

Then I did a bit of search­ing on the inter­net, and found that pretty much every­one who bought the Wave Inspire 7s seems to have dis­liked them, or at least those who’ve blogged and com­men­ted about the things. So it wasn’t just me.

The good news is that every­one who then took a punt on the new Wave Inspire 8s seems to think they’re a return to the good form of the earlier Wave Inspires. So, I will prob­ably take my chances with Mizuno once again, though my faith is a bit shaken.

Hope­fully a pair of new shoes will put a bit of bounce back in my step, even if it’s only psychologically-speaking…

Any­way. Enough ram­bling for now. I should be run­ning later on this week, so I’ll see you then!