These shoes were made for walking…

Well running actually. 

Since getting back from our extended trip to learn the route, life has been rather hectic, but for once not with X-Alps activities.  Instead I’ve had the pleasure of some family time, and the less pleasurable, but necessary, demands of work to manage.

Still, for those of you following my preparation – the glider is now complete with X-Alps logo on the top surface and Pringles Xtreme logo on the under surface – I’ll hopefully get a picture this weekend and add it to the blog.

Now to the title of this post – before leaving for Austria I spent a whole morning in New Concept Sport in Geneva, where Laurent patiently made me try on almost every shoe in the shop, and run around the block in many of them (often with a  different shoe on each foot).  All I can say is that the people in the café two doors down must have been quite amused!  Anyhow, the point of this exercise, together with the treadmill analysis and foot contact area analysis beforehand, was to find the ideal shoes, both trial shoes and road shoes.  I didn’t write about it straight away as I wanted to see what they were like to run and walk in.  As we say in English the proof of the pudding is in the eating.  Now, having covered several 100km’s in the last few weeks, I can confirm they are perfect.  I’d more or less eradicated blisters, at least in training, but with these shoes there are no signs even of rubbing, and the trial shoes seem pretty water resistant (even though not theoretically waterproof) given after 5hrs walking in the mountains in the rain I only just started to get wet feet.

So my thanks to Laurent for a thoroughly professional job – for the record the trial shoes are Adiddas and the road shoes are Brooks…

Final news for now is that I am now entering my final phase of physical training, which means the effort actually ramps down, eventually to a week of total rest prior to the race itself.  Rather nice after averaging 60-70hrs training a month for the last 6 months!