Sunday, Jan. 6th . . . lots of snow; adjusting the long run

So I had a long run planned but I woke up to 14-16 inches of snow so I had to adjust my work-out. I really enjoy running in deep power snow but you have to adjust the work-out to account for the additional leg workout from running in deep snow. I decided to increase my barefoot warm-up to 15 minutes, then laced up the Mizuno Wave Universe 3's and added the Yak Trak coils and ran for 1 hr. It was awesome. Then, I did another barefoot session with 10 minutes of barefoot running as the warm-down. Total workout was 1:25.

I've decided to spend a few months to really study and evaluate the types of shoes I run in so that I can develop a solid shoe rotation by this spring. There are so many factors when you select footwear which is one reason I love barefoot running because it's easy as all you need is your feet. As for footwear, my goal is to select 2-3 shoes that allow me to run with form and technique as close to barefoot as possible. I'll select a primary shoe rotation from the following shoes: Mizuno Wave Universe 3, Evo, Nike Air Zoom Streak XC, Nike Katana, Nike Free 3.0, Inov-8 F-Lite 195, Adam, and Adidas Adizero Rocket. My primary factors of consideration include weight, heel differential, amount of cushion, good feel, degree of muscle pre-activation, ability for my foot to flatten upon loading, and overall feel.

Of course, I'll have certain shoes based on terrain but 90% of my running is on packed dirt roads, trails and roads so I build a primary shoe rotation to address most of my running. I'll also continue to study my running log to identify trends, good and bad, based on my experiences with certain footwear.

HHH