Hello first blog post! The point of this blog is to catalog the journey of myself (Lindsey)and my sister (Ashley) in our training to participate in the Glass Slipper Challenge at the Walt Disney Princess Half Marathon weekend 2017!
It's exciting and tiring and challenging and scary. And expensive. Who knew running was such an expensive form of torture hobby? Ash and I just went with Jess, our friend who we have tricked into running the half marathon with us, shoe shopping for some hot new running kicks! We had been experiencing different issues between the three of us- knee pain, shin splints, weird popping in the calves, flat feet- and decided we should probably take the time to go to a proper running store and have them tell us what we are doing wrong, where we could improve and then invest in a pair of proper running shoes. Cha-Ching! Monday was our first run in our new shoes, sans Jessica who ditched us for a dinner party (Who would rather eat when you could be sweating your butt off running in this lovely Florida heat?!). My sister in her sleek new pair of Brooks Ghost 8 and I, in my kinda ugly and orthopedic-looking but oh so comfy Hoka One One Clifton 3s. These Hokas are über plush, so squishy! It feels like walking on clouds but after our first three minutes of running my calves were on fire! I'll be honest, I was expecting miracles to happen when I put these shoes on... I would run perfectly, faster, farther, absolutely pain free, I would stop complaining and shed 5lbs all in that first run with these new shoes on my feet! None of that happened. In fact I ran slower, shorter, I felt pain in muscles that were being used that apparently had been lying dormant, I complained most of the way... Maybe I lost 5lbs of water weight with all that sweating (have I mentioned how hot it is in Florida?), but I'm feeling quite peckish right now so whatever was done is soon to be undone. My sister had no problems. This is the usual.
It was a pretty action packed run though, that was for sure. We live close to the beach so we like to run towards it, once we reached the top of the drawbridge to the beach we paused to take in the scenery and catch our breath (we had just run up hill (a foreign experience to a Floridian)). As we took in the view of the sunsetting we noticed a family of cownose rays swimming below the bridge, the reward for that run up the bridge.
After our breath had been caught and the burning in my calves ceased it was time to run back down the hill. Sometimes I just want to curl up and roll down the hill, like the lost boy Thud Butt in Hook.
Once reaching the bottom of the hill I hit a wall (figurative of course (thankfully)) and realized I did not have the right socks for my new shoes resulting in a few lovely blisters on the upper part of my heel. As I was busy trying to pull my socks up higher to cover the area my sister ran ahead to find a drunken man falling into a very busy road, a man pulled over to see if the man was ok I caught up and the man was sitting in the gutter scraped and cut up from his fall. He said he was ok, the other man jumped back into his car and drove off two other joggers ran past and didn't even stop. I asked the man to move away from the road for his safety, he got up and continued to stumble down the sidewalk, my sister and I followed him. Fearing he would again fall into the road and get hit by a car as it was quickly getting dark out we called the police, the man stumbled off behind a building before any police were dispatched, hopefully he made it home okay and slept it off.
Whatever happened to him, his fall allowed me a nice break and a leisurely stroll most of the way home.
So we survived an action packed run and live to run another day! Like this evening, hopefully it goes better than Monday.
My sister and I also bought a pair of Mizunos, the Wave Enigma 5 as a backup shoe for shorter runs. Ash found them at TJ Maxx for $40, a very good price as they sell for $150, right now they are available on Mizunos website for about $100, the Enigma 6 must be coming out. Hopefully by rotating my shoes I'll be able to make the Hokas last longer.
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