Yesterday I had a three mile shoulder run* outside. I went the familiar route down Armitage and up Sheffield - I seem to be a creature of habit when it comes to my routes – and had an all around good run. This was my first run in the new shoes and everything went fairly smoothly. It’s never a blast to break in a new set of trainers but thankfully my Asics felt pretty good on their first 3 miles.

I’m still perplexed at how my last pair wore out so quickly. I was consciously trying not to scrape my left foot during the run yesterday. I kept thinking ‘push off lightly’ and ‘float don’t drag’ but we will know in a hundred miles or so if my stride changed at all. I am tempted to see an expert for some gait analysis to see if I can correct the problem – living in Chicago this shouldn’t be a big deal – but maybe it is something I just need to learn to live with.


Tonight is a new episode of Lost so I think I’ll head over to the gym around 7:45 to get a good treadmill. Thankfully the rush of New Year’s Resolution Runners has died down and grabbing a treadmill is not a problem these days.

I’m getting excited for my 13 miler this weekend and for the Shamrock Shuffle on April 2nd. There are 25,000 runners signed up which is approximately the population of my hometown.

*The term shoulder run is one I just invented (or unconsciously stole from someone else) to describe either of the short runs during a given training week. Since the pattern is short, medium, short, long each week with the short, medium, sort runs falling on back-to-back-to-back days the short runs are shoulder runs to me.