Part of recovering from this injury (tibial stress syndrome) and getting back to running is a re-evaluation and fine-tuning of the shoes I’m running in. For the past five months, I’ve been running in the Brooks Adrenaline GTS 14 model. I bought them about a week after my half marathon in April and they were definitely an improvement over the every day New Balances I had been running in. Don’t get me wrong, I still really like NB, but the upgrade to Brooks for running made a big difference.
Those Brooks gave me quite a bit more support and I could certainly tell the difference. About six weeks into those new shoes, however, I got injured. I don’t believe it had anything to do with the shoes; my physical therapist is also pretty adamant that given my physiology (flat-footed, over-pronator), this injury was inevitable. The timing also meant that I only put about 90-100 miles on them before my injury, and in the past four weeks since I started running again, probably only about an additional 20. As far as shoe lifetimes go, these are still perfectly good shoes that should get me through about another 300 miles, but this injury has forced me to re-think what I’m running in.
The first step was a good insole. I bought these Montrail moldable insoles and they definitely gave me a lot more support without introducing rubbing or poking. One tip is that I had to exchange them for one size down from my shoe size so that they would fit just right.
These have worked well and my PT approves of them, but I decided this week that I wanted to try out a full motion control shoe, just to see if it would make a difference and let me get back to running longer distance without too much pain in my leg. The Adrenalines are considered a Stability shoe, and one step up from that is Motion Control. So, to the running store I went, and after trying three different pairs from a few different brands and almost a mile total of jogging it out on the store treadmill, I walked out with a pair of Brooks Addiction 11’s. I ran in them for the first time today, with the insoles, and I am definitely a fan.
I was a little apprehensive since they appear to be a “beefy”shoe, but they are surprisingly light weight and I didn’t feel like I was clomping around at all. I did a little over 5 miles of trails in these today partly because I’m still really wary of hard surface running and also because, in a moment of insanity, I recently signed up for a trail half marathon in November. 🙂
My goal is to find a shoe I really like, that helps keep me injury free, so I can just buy a new pair each time they wear out and not have any more surprises or trial periods. I’m pleased with these and will stick with them for a while to see how they perform.
I no longer consider myself a rookie runner, but in a lot of ways, I’m definitely still a newbie. This whole journey to the right shoe and how to keep myself injury free is just part of that. I’m feeling very positive about my 15K race on October 5th and yes, even about the trail half marathon on November 8th! I’m just so stinking happy to be running again!!!!!
My other focus in these coming months is fine-tuning race/running fuel strategies. I’ll write another post about it, but I’m considering either going entirely with homemade options, or at least 50/50 with store-bought gels. There are some really amazing vegan/vegetarian recipes out there for “energy ball” type goodies that frankly just sound way more amazing than gels. I’m not sure they will be as easy to consume and digest though, so let the trial and error begin!
And finally, vegetarianism is still going strong. I’m going to focus on whether I seem to recover from exercise and longer runs quicker, as pretty much every veg/vegan runner claims. That would be helpful since I would still like to get to a place where my weekly mileage is more in the 20-25 range once I’m fully recovered from this injury.
I stumbled onto some vegan “ice cream” at Sprouts yesterday. Even if you’re not vegan, I recommend this stuff simply because they had some really unique and tantalizing flavors and honestly, it’s just as rich and creamy (and bad for you) as the real stuff!
Becky