Greetings From New York

I am back in New York visiting my family and enjoying a pseudo vacation. I'm working on a few projects but otherwise I'm free to chillax with Frank and harass my relatives into taking photos of me.

I accidentally had my Fabletics outfits sent to my parents' house. This is the Highway 74 outfit and I love the mesh palm tee shirt and the white sports bra. The Dili shorts are cool because they have little tabs to tighten the sides.

Happy Feet

I hate blisters and foot pain. This is obviously nothing revolutionary. I'm sure most people hate blisters and foot pain, but when you're into covering long distances by foot, it's kind of par for the course.

You need to have proper footwear for a trail race. I own La Sportiva Wildcats and Brooks ASRs. As a wear tester, I'm really fortunate that Brooks sends me pairs to test out. I'm a big fan of the ASR 9s.

I wore the ASR 9s for the first 25 miles of the race. They are pretty lightweight for trail shoes, 9.5 ounces, and they're really similar to the Adrenalines I wear on the road.

I packed my Wildcats in my drop bag and switched pairs at the halfway point. I am so glad that I did because they have a lot more cushion and the ankles are higher for more stability. Different shoe models mean that my feet weren't subjected to the same pressure points, which means less pain and risk of blisters.

This kid did not come with two pairs of shoes and tried to run the trail in road Vibrams. Eek. He was hurting pretty bad so I offered him my ASRs for the last 17 miles. I was happy to help him out and glad he had small lady feet.

Always bring two pairs of shoes!

I've found myself in a bit of a predicament. I track the mileage on my shoes using RunningAHEAD. If I switched shoes in the middle of the run, how do I track one run with two pairs of shoes? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated because it's keeping me up at night. That's not a joke.

RunningAHEAD

So the other day I went to log into my Runners World training log and it seems that I no longer have an account. Um weird?

No bother because I wasn't too happy with the RW after I got my Garmin. I ended up having to use one to log my equipment use and Garmin Connect/Daily Mile to log my overall miles and routes. Extra steps means I probably won't use it. Although my Garmin is currently in the shop (more about that later), I have been using the Garmin Fit app. New year, new miles, new logging system.

I decided I wanted a website that would allow me to upload my Garmin training from both my Forerunner and the Fit app, to track the mileage on all of my running shoes and other gear, and that had a widget for my blog. One exceptionally boring conference call later and I had Googled my way to RunningAHEAD.

This is a free site that feeds my inner data junkie. As you can see in the screenshot below, you're given weekly run stats, monthly run stats, rolling run totals, and overall run totals. Right now I've only logged default runs, but my graph will show long, tempo, race, hill, fartlek, and easy runs once I start logging them as such.

I'm a fan of the Run Entry form because it has a place for equipment and includes my interval splits from my Garmin upload. At about 350 miles, I start using my shoes for short runs and the fake team sports I play, like kickball and volleyball. With closets full of running shoes, logging miles for each pair is extremely helpful. Unfortunately I cannot log into RW to figure out how many miles are already on the pairs I have.

I had been using Daily Mile's blog widget but since I never bothered to upload my run to Daily Mile, it looked like I never ran at all. I have since switched to one of RunningAHEAD's widgets. You can choose which format you like best, but this is my favorite because it has your last run's info and mileage for the week, month, and year.

If you're looking for an easy way to collect all of your run data in one place, check out RunningAHEAD. There's also a forum section where runners can join groups and post about different topics. I've been looking around on there and it seems like a pretty nifty community if you're into posting.