And so the Road to the Sham ends with a cancellation of the race due to Wuhan Corona virus AKA: COVID-19. Don't let these folks bully you into not saying Wuhan virus. All current evidence says it started in Wuhan China and it's not racist to say so. If they want to go down that hole then they need to call the Spanish Flu by it's "science" name, H1N1. But that's not really the point of this post.
Anyway. Months of training for this particular event was not in vain. No, I won't be racing so I won't get the PR, well, shot at the PR, but I am much fitter than before and I've had eye opening experiences some of which I'll review below:
1) Current MAF training results: I have dropped between 30 seconds to a minute on my MAF runs. Hills that spiked my heart rate well over MAF limits are now manageable. That is I still slow down but I no longer have to walk to maintain my MAF number.
2) I have been able to run over 100 miles a month without injury. This is something that was impossible to do prior to MAF training and being very strict about speed during rest days. Matter of fact HAVING rest days. Now the pros are doing 100 miles a week. I'm not there yet particularly since I'm not doing marathons, but I'll definitely be doing more mileage as the months go along to maintain this fitness.
3) I have a bad arch in my left foot. In February I purchased a new sneaker: Nike Vomero 14.
This was the first non-stability shoe I have run in since the early 2000s. I got into stability shoes after knee, Achilles and a heel spur. Looking back I figured that it was my sneakers rather than my form (I heel struck). In the past 5 years or so I adjusted to a mid-foot strike but I still wore stability shoes with inserts. Problems went away. So I thought that perhaps now that I was running in better form that I could wear a neutral show. Yes I did try the Vaporfly 4%. It was very springy but had nothing under my arches. I thought it to be a bad idea to spend on that if I couldn't run in it for long due to arch issues. Glad I didn't.
Anyway Vomeros were and are very comfortable. Very springy and make my stability shoes feel like well...shoes. Since I was still comfortable I got the idea to get a lighter shoe for the faster runs and race day. I settled on the Nike Pegasus Turbo 2.
Soooo..very light. Very springy. Even less arch support.
Did a few tempo and threshold runs in them. Great.
Then the pains started. Particularly in one foot. Exactly what I was afraid of. I noticed at the end of the run while walking that my left foot was collapsing inward. Something that doesn't happen in my stability shoes. Boooooo.
I put my old insert into the Vomeros but they made the problem worse because now the shoe was too tight. But that's when I noticed it was only one foot that had issues. Just to confirm, I put the inserts into my stability shoe, which I had stopped using since they felt like garbage compared to the Nikes, and took another run where I found the inserts helped with the impacts, making them closer to the Nikes but now I had no foot pain (which honestly usually went away after a mile or so in the Nikes)
My next experiment will be to put the insole into the left Vomero and nothing in the right since that foot doesn't seem to have problems. But now that the race is cancelled I don't need to wear the faster shoes since given the current public scare it's unlikely to be running any races until the fall. Perhaps this will give me the chance to get custom inserts from one of those stores that I can use in the Nikes.
Right now the summer plans are to go heavy into the MAF training, including my bike rides in order to increase my aerobic capacity. The faster I can run at low heart rates the faster I can run in race conditions.
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