New Shoes!

I have two pairs of running shoes. One for work and one for home. The reason I have two pairs is because several years ago I left a pair on the bus. The really shitty thing about doing this, aside from the fact that no one ever turned them in to lost and found, is that they were only a week old. Additionally shitty was that I also had my pull buoy (with my name on it) from swimming in the same bag. I never saw either again.

So, I bought two pairs of shoes, one for work and one for home so I would have to worry about being responsible and actually remembering to take all my crap off the bus with me when debarking. While a little more expensive an option than some would choose to take, it's worked well for me ever since.

My most recent pair has definitely seen better days. They're a bit over a year old and each have about 400 miles on them including a bunch of triathlons and running races. They were purchased as part of a Cyber Monday, free shipping, deep discount, online shopping extravaganza. As any triathlete will tell you, the surest way to decrease the lifespan of any piece of equipment is to race with it - especially in triathlon. Things get wet from swimming, wet and salty from profuse sweating (hey, some of us perspire), and wet and sticky from sports drink spills. Anyway, these shoes were probably long overdue for changing.

Before anyone considers criticizing my length of shoe usage, consider this: cheap running shoes are essentially the same as expensive running shoes except that they don't last as long. As someone put it to me, the expensive running shoes last about twice as long as the cheap ones, so you don't really save any money. Whether or not that's true, I do know that if I wear running shoes too long, I get shin splints. And, I haven't gotten shin splints since I was a kid. 'Nuff said.

I dug around online looking for the same model as my current shoes, the ASICS Gel-Nimbus IX, only to discover that they had been replaced (of course) by the next model, X. Oh, I found plenty of IX models online, but they were in sizes of <> 11. So, I had to "settle" for the X model.

They came yesterday and man, are they sweet. I put my new orthotics in them and went for a run today. All I can say is "wow." It's awesome. Sometimes you don't realize just how bad something is until you replace it with something good.

I just need an extra set of running orthotics so I don't have to keep pulling them out of my work pair to bring home.