Today I changed up my shoes again and went with the Under Armour Revenants that I ran my marathon in. I don’t run much in them now because they have a lot of cushioning and I don’t want to ingrain bad habits by using them too much. I like to vary my shoes, keeping my feet guessing and changing stress points.
Why do I not always run in what conventional wisdom deems “proper running shoes”, especially if I have them? Shoe choice is an intensely personal thing and depends on many factors, including comfort, foot strike, running philosophy, injury history and a bunch of other things. I would never be so rude as to ridicule another runner’s shoe choice (especially if they had run a marathon and I hadn’t!), but such people exist and seem to think they have a right to have their opinions heard. I run mostly in minimalistic shoes because I’m not yet psychologically ready to go completely barefoot. One day I’ll give it a shot on a road run. I grew up barefoot, so it’s not much of a change for me. More of an undoing of bad habits picked up by running in “proper running shoes”.
Enough of that lol and back to today’s run. Unfortunately today I again fell 20 metres short of the 4 km mark in the 30 minutes.
3.98 km in 30 minutes at an average pace of 7:33 mins/km, average heart rate of 151 bpm.
From about half way today, my heart rate often kept going up after I dropped to a walk, which was very annoying. A couple of times I had to drop to strolling speed to lower my heart rate to acceptable levels. I’m not too upset, though, because my first km after a good warm up was 6:30 mins/km and I’m well ahead of where I was when I started this challenge.