Altra-nate shoes

With the Altra Torin 2.5’s being on sale for near half price everywhere I bought a pair.  I ran them yesterday for my intervals (10min warmup, 5min Z4, 1m z2, repeat 4) with my running partner.

makes me bounce like Tigger on a sugar rush”

I wanted the Altra Paradigm 2.0’s but they’re hard to find in my size.  They’re a maximal cushioned shoe, i.e. a massive stack height.  For long distances though a maximal stack height is something I kind of want.

It was wet out, a bit of a spring downpour had just gone overhead so the first thing I noted about the Torin’s is they actually have some traction on asphalt unlike my Hoka Clifton 3’s which are very slippery on wet concrete.

The Torin’s are definitely a ‘moderate’ cushion shoe.  I’m not sure I’d want to run a marathon in them without dropping another 70 lbs.

The 0 drop shoes reinforce moving off of heel striking but they can only go so far in changing your stride.  Trying to switch from a hard core heel striker after 50 years of running that way is tough.   Trying to toe strike makes me bounce like Tigger on a sugar rush. Getting a mid foot strike may be the best compromise I can come up with.

I think they run a little small myself in spite of their ‘true to size’ rating.  My foot measures as a 12.6 on the U.S. foot scale and at a 13 these may require a little breaking in or thinner socks than the Balega Blister Resists I was wearing to fit ‘right’.   As usual when things are a little crowded my pointer and middle toes on my right foot start to complain at about the 3 mile mark.

Luckily I have three boys who wear the same size shoes so any shoes I don’t like for running and aren’t bad enough to send back go to them.   So if these don’t work out one of them will get them.

Each time I do intervals I do think my natural pace is faster than my current pace.  9’s feels more natural to me as a pace.  The problem is I can’t maintain it for a long distance.  It takes a lot of energy to push as much mass as I have and am likely to continue to have and the energy costs are not linear as pace increases as you’re very aware.

On a plus note, I matched my 5K PR time during this training session and I could have pushed it more for a 5K distance.  On top of that it was an after work run and my morning runs are always better.  Bottom line my next 5K, first Friday in May should see me with a new PR.  Of course the day after that 5K I’m running back to back Warrior Dashes.  So those may not be all that fast. 🙂

A #runner I deal with on a daily basis REALLY wants a Stryd.  I was looking at them, the whole train by power thing and the #omfgaccurate allegedly for pace it is interesting but I’m not sure about the data. How do you ‘use’ that data to become more efficient or better at #notrunning?

I was looking at their training plans and they seem to be dominated by intervals and hilly intervals.  The whole high intensity training seems to be everywhere.  My own Garmin based training plans have quite a lot of it.

I doubt I’ll ever get down to the 8′ pace I had in my 20’s/30’s again.  There’s a very valid reason the BQ times get longer based on age.   There’s only so much stress/output you can squeeze out of the human body at any given age and in general it continually declines over time after peaking far too soon IMO of the human lifespan.

Interestingly statistically #runners who start young burn out in their 30’s in terms of their PR times.   #notarunners who are more casual in their efforts can set PR’s quite later in life.  So in theory I still have some performance increases and can keep setting PR’s.