lol, vibrams.
I will not be caught dead in a pair of those. you're 100% right about "no shock absorption," and "feeling the road" is fairly useless. as far as minimalism goes there are hundreds of better choices that actually cushion your foot a little..... nike frees, saucony kinvaras, those funny newtons whose name I don't remember, any sort of road flat, any sort of xc or track spike (without the spikes, of course)........ and the things just look so damn goofy! ~__~
anyways, update time!!
the pool shoes were a fucking dumbshit idea. they added even more blisters to the ones I already had and pretty much put me out of running for a week, as it just hurt too much to take a step. I'm back in houston now though, so I have full access to a track + lots of soft dirt/grass trails, so my feet have been taking it very well. my shoes don't hurt me at all anymore, so my legs are the limiting factor again. feels good.
the cross country coaches think it is in my best interest to drop the mileage really low (like 20 mpw low) and just pound out 20 quarters every other day and run like 3 super easy on alternate days to recover. I personally find this a little bit silly, so what I've started doing is taking the 2 interval days a little easier (we only practice 4 days a week....sigh) and running an easy 5 every morning in addition to what I normally do. since I am a whole lot faster than everyone else on the team, taking the intervals easy is no problem because I still "win" by a lot (yes I know, racing workouts and seeing who wins is stupid, but our coaches think that we're gonna race like we workout, so every practice is a race), so I can often jog a few miles after the interval days, and it sort of feels the way I feel after a hard fartlek. on easy days, I've tried to go out and do another 5 at a decent pace, which feels a little bit more taxing but still leaves me fine for the intervals. on friday (we practice monday through thursday) I do the usual 5 easy in the morning and a 4 mile tempo in the afternoon, at an embarrassingly slow 7:20 pace (well, that's what it was last week), but in my defense as we pound out more intervals I'll probably be able to handle the faster paces. every week I've been seeing decreases of like 5 sec/mile (I like 4 mile tempos so I did them a lot over the summer), so I should be in fairly good 5k shape in no time at all. saturday is an easy day. jog 5 in the morning and jog 5 in the afternoon, to sort of freshen me up after the tempo, which for me is the hardest day of the week. and then sunday I do the long run because it suits me to not double that day, usually I'll just go until I feel like I've done something, but not to the point where I'm completely drained. usually 8 or 9 easy in around a half hour. I'm considering dropping the pace a little bit and gradually increasing the time until I can go comfortably for 2 hours rather than an hour and a half, then steadily increasing the pace again. I hear that the difference in benefits between 90 min and 120 min is a lot greater than the difference between 60 min and 90 min. I also do short sprints with full recovery on days when I'm feeling good, but never two days in a row.
so yeah, that puts me at a little bit under 70 mpw, which may be a little bit much considering a good portion of that is tempo/intervals, but ya know, gotta have the quality in there too as well as the quantity. I may cut back the mileage on some of the easy days if I feel like going slow is not enough for me to recover. and, as I get more used to this fast running as well as the decently high mileage, who knows, it may well just get easier for me to the point where rather than increase distance I just start taking the intervals a little harder each week.
I have a really good feeling about this season!!