Not sure how long
Nice day, low 70's.
I did almost 15 miles today. It was a relatively uneventful, nice run. I did a normalish route that took me down, then up the lake, then west to the river and back east across the Wilson bridge in the Ravenswood Manor neighborhood.
At one point--and I'm sorry to lay this on you, kids, but it's just a fact of running such ridiculous distances--I had the rumbly tummy and had to stop at a graciously-located city park building to use the bathroom. I had never considered knocking on someone's door to use the bathroom before today. I guess there's a first time for everything.
But the run went well. And I felt pretty good afterwards, because I just recently started running on new shoes. The Team to End AIDS crew suggested we get new shoes, if we were going to, a month-and-a-half before the race to properly break them in. The idea is that it's bad to run a long distance on a shoe that your foot hasn't gotten to know a bit better. So I sprang for some new shoes the other week, and boy are my feet not tired. I got these Asics that are specifically build for "pronators" or people who tend to run on the outside part of the foot.
My bow-legged, hip-displaced legs lead my feet to this very condition, which doesn't bother me, but shows over time in my running shoes.
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That funny wear pattern is on the outside of my left heel. The treads of these shoes were fully intact at the beginning of my training.
At the orientation to the Team to End AIDS training program, they gave us some facts about running and the foot which made me think twice about buying a second pair of running shoes in the span of under a year--something I've never ever done before. They noted that when running, the each footfall places nearly 2 1/2 times your body weight in force on your soles and the bones and ligaments thereof. So for me, that's about 375 lbs. of force on my foot each time it hits the pavement. Stretch that over a mile (for my stride, roughly 4 ft., making 1,320 footfalls per mile), and you're looking at 495,000 lbs. of force on your two feet or 247,500 lbs. of force on each foot. And that's just one mile!
Since Americans aren't good at math, I'll bring this equation to completion for you. So today, I ran 14.7 mi., putting 3,638,250 lbs. of force on each foot today, making a total of over 7.2 million lbs. of force on the old ground-pounders today. It'll be about 13 million lbs. on race day. And that's a lot of coconuts. Now, bearing in mind that the feet are just composed of 26 of some of the smaller bones in your body, a bunch of ligaments, a few muscles and nerves, a heap of skin at the bottom and couple toenails, the amount of pressure they can take is incredible.
So you'll understand why I went out and dropped some dough on new kicks when I'm broke as a joke. And after the run today, my feet felt supported and loved, as if the new shoes had made them chicken noodle soup when they were home sick from school. And come race day, I'm hoping they'll feel roughly as though the shoes had at least cheered for them when a dozen school bully's beat them up at recess. I think that's the best I can hope for.
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