Running Shorts

Alright, so now that cross country season is starting to gear up (first day of official practice for the high schoolers in Ohio is Monday!), I thought it'd be a good time for another post geared towards the scholastic runners. Not that this topic isn't applicable to everyone else out there, but I think it'll resonate most with the former type of runners. Showing up at practice, no matter what team you run for or who your coach is, you can bet one of the first things you will run through are the classic form drills. High knees, butt kicks, A-skips, B-skips, high skips, carioca, backwards running; the list goes on. You've probably already done some of those and you probably also do some other not on that list. And if you're in school, you'll probably do them just about every day from Day 1 without any more specific rationale than, "they improve your form." But do they improve your form? In my opinion, the answer is no. So you do you really need to

GEAR CHECK is another semi-regular-when-I'm-feeling-it series like the WORKOUT OF THE WEEK and various race recaps. There's a ton of different products out there marketed towards runners, so I wanted to highlight some of the things that I use and what I think about them. It might also be telling the stuff I don't use, but that's a whole 'nother topic. The Asics DS-Trainer is my shoe. I've been running in various versions of this for nearly the past eight years, with the exception of one lost year while I was wearing the Saucony Guide as part of their Hurricane program. This is my review of the shoe, but it's going to be a little different that most shoe reviews: I'm not going to talk about manufacturer specs or product details or anything like that (if you want those, go to the manufacturer website ); instead, I'm going to talk about how it fits, how it feels, and who it's for. In my opinion, that's the truly important stuff, anyway. M

Finishing place: ??? Time: 15:10-ish (?) Photo courtesy of Shelton Graves Alright, so this was my third time doing this event, and it was by far my best performance here. In 2013 I entered in a weird limbo between marathon recovery and hard interval training, and so nothing translated to a quality race performance. Last year I had run a great race three weeks earlier, but then strained my hamstring and didn't run very much leading up to the Blast, which showed in a poor race. This year I entered in a good training rhythm after a solid block of base training. Only problem: it was a solid block of base training . I was in great fundamental shape, but not great race shape (especially a race as short as a 5k and competitive as this one). So I had to temper my expectations a bit...I knew I wasn't going to be competitive with the top runners going 14:20-30; for me at this point a sub-15 would be a great time on this course. Having those tempered expectation, I had to stay