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Week 8 Recap

In summary, this past week has been rest and recuperation.

It all started with an afterwork run on Family Day Monday when I struggled mightily and had difficulties keeping pace even to just keep up at my usual comfy pace (which is pretty slow already). This is where I reviewed my most recent rest week, which was four weeks ago, and also realizing that my unrealistic goal of keeping up with true running athletes is reaching my own limits. The shin pains were increasingly unbearable and even the foam roller can only go so far. I can only imagine to only train smarter rather than harder for the week ahead.

I also finally settled onto a new pair of trainers after racking up about 1,100 km or more on my old pair of Gel Nimbus 17. I ultimately settled with the most recent version of Nimbus 19 but is still skeptical given the lukewarm reviews online during research. Now that I acquired this onto my training regime, I intend to write a more thorough review to debunk the myths of the things written about the Gel Nimbus 19s.

One of the first things after purchasing the shoes was to physically bend down the soles on the runners to fast track the break-in process. This concept was originally sourced from one of the YouTube videos that I found sometime last year when I just got my other runners. As shown on the slideshow, I turned this sole bending procedure as part of my new shoe break-in ritual. It significantly reduced pains and unnecessary inflammations on my feet by doing so. This was confirmed from my trial test run as shown on the Strava activity below where I managed to comfortably add speed on incline when I would have otherwise scaled down on speed for the sake of comfortable incline adjustments.  

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Over thousands of kilometres accumulated on all these runners

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What's Next

I intend to hit the gym and get back onto the dreaded treadmill and more lower body stretches instead of accumulating mileage. Saturday long run will still happen but would definitely scale back in pace.

The Around The Bay 30K race in Hamilton is also in a matter of 3 to 4 weeks so the upcoming month of March is pretty much time to wrap the hard work up and transitioning into tapering mode. This means being careful with my running mileage, the pace involved, and gradually switching my training runners (Gel Nimbus) back and forth with my race shoe (Adidas Boston Boost) in anticipation of the actual race day.

Hopefully this week will be kind to me and mostly body pain free...

Cheers, M.W.