I took yesterday as a rest day, after my 10+ miler on Tuesday, falling and bruising my body as well as my ego, along with having a 15 day running streak going…well it was just time for a day off. I don’t do well at streaking too long and this is about as many days in a row as I usually get to before I start feeling stale, sore or grumpy.
Needless to say I still wanted to go for a run, so I had to play that game, well I can do it later most of the day.
However, I was good and even though I was sorely tempted when Mary went out for her run (before the rain started), instead I opted to clean out the old garden plastic that we had been storing under the house over the years. Five lawn and leaf bags later I got all of that plastic ready to take to the transfer station.
It was one of those nasty/dirty jobs that you procrastinate doing, so needless to say, I really would have rather run, but this had been on my todo list for a while and needed to get done.
We did go up to Waterville to do errands, so that occupied a good part of the afternoon, which made things a little easier as far as me avoiding running.
In the late afternoon, I usually get on the elliptical for a bit, but if I am going to take a rest day, I try to make it a real rest day and not do any workouts, so I needed to keep myself occupied.
Which got me to thinking about and looking at my Forza 3’s and GRR7’s to see what it is that is making them less than my ideal running shoes and what I have done to improve them for me.
Forza 3’s
Even though I had a really nice 10+ miler in the Forza 3’s Tuesday, I just don’t feel entirely comfortable running in them there always seems to be something going on that makes me think about my feet when I wear them for a run.
With the stock insole in them (it is the same one as the GRR7’s), the Forza 3’s are fairly firm, which is not a bad thing for a light support style of shoe, but I tend to prefer a more cushioned feel. I did replace the stock insole with a thicker one before my long run and that seemed to help quite a bit with how they felt during the run.
The size 8.5 fit is a bit too long and the shoe feels well a little sloppy unless I really snug down on the laces. In the photo above, I will have to snug them down a bit more, which will bring the eyelets too close together. Probably an 8.0 would be a better fit for me in this model, maybe even an 7.5.
For some reason the loop style lacing holes, when I replaced the laces with a different pair (I dislike flat laces and prefer the more rounded ones), it seemed to allow them to keep snugging up the laces each time I put them on. Then I wouldn’t realize how tight the laces had gotten until I was out on a run, which bothered the top of my feet. So I replaced the regular laces with LockLaces this afternoon to see if I get a more consistent fit.
The other thing that I finally figured out was that the heel flare is fairly wide and angled in from the outsole. I am hitting my other leg when I stride a bit more than I have in a long time in the Forza 3’s
Part of the blame is that duck-footed stride of mine, but it after the 9th or 10th time of me clipping the Forza’s heel against my other leg, it does get a bit tiresome. I knew that it was happening, but didn’t notice how much until I saw the tell-tale streaks on the inside of each leg after running down back last week and then during the long run the other day when I got more tired it became more of an issue. No real solution for this, with the way I run other than to keep my feet straighter when running.
The photo above is after I wiped my feet on my boot cleaner, the pebbles are mostly out, but during the long run the heel section was caked with sand, grit and pebbles that wouldn’t clear unless I dragged, stamped my feet on the tar.
For me the outsole design is a pebble magnet, which when I looked at the bottom of the Forza 3’s after I fell on Tuesday, were fairly well coated with embedded pebbles. So I tend to think when with the pebble build-up in the outsole after 10 miles, combined with hitting the sand on corner may have contributed (no it was not the only factor) to the lack of traction, which resulted in that crash and burn.
Unfortunately, it is just the way it is that there is a lot of sand, dirt roads, sandy road shoulders and bit of mud where I run.
While I have run fairly well in the Forza 3’s, there are an accumulation of little things that make them a shoe I can run in versus a shoe I want to run in – which is a big difference. Hopefully, with the changes I am making, it will make them a more comfortable for me to run in and something that I want to run in.
GoRun Ride 7
The GRR7’s have been my favorite running shoes this year, but experienced significant wear on the heel of the left foot and right ankle well at just under a 150 miles.
Enough that I was afraid of blistering from both spots, so I stopped running in them with less than 150 miles on them. However, I believe that I have solved the riddle of why those issues occurred.
When I got the GRR7’s I put LockLaces in, however I did not use the last lace slot, which I now know was a mistake with these shoes. By not using that last slot, my heel slipped too much and prematurely wore a hole in the heel cup. So to solve that I tried lacing through the last hole with the LockLaces, unfortunately, that made the shoes too tight feeling when putting them on and uncomfortable to wear for a long periods of time.
Since that did not work, I decided that I would put in regular laces and see if that worked. Just wearing them around the house they feel a lot more comfortable and I noticed that my heels felt a lot more locked down.
As for the ankle wear, it was one of those things that I wrote about shortly after getting them and while the rubbing on my ankle never caused a blister, the high sidewall was something that was a slight distraction when running in the GoRun Ride 7’s. My solution is to put a thicker insole in and see if it lifted my ankle up off the ankle well enough or not. It almost worked, so I took a pair of scissors and cleaned up the area around the wear spot and it feels a lot better.
Now that I have made these changes I want to see if the GRR7’s can be run in again. If I can run in them again, that would be fantastic, because they are a great shoe to run in.
The reality is that
While I didn’t run yesterday, I think that I have positively done some things that will help me run better in the shoes that I have in the house. I really hope that those things work, especially for the GRR7’s, which is a shoe that I really loved until I wore the hole in the heel cup and felt that I had to stop running in them.
Please don’t take all the negative things that I have written about the Forza 3 or Ride 7’s as anything other than things that I need to improve for them to work better for me. My body is weird and most runners will not have nearly the issues that I have had in either model. The fact that I want to fix things shows that I do like running in them, instead of me just putting them in the back of the garage to eventually go away.
It is pretty amazing to me how much difference a different shoe laces and/or a pair of insoles can make to the fit and feel to my of running shoes.
A pretty good rest day if I say so myself.
