I recently took out my awards and have been unsure what to do with them. I don't think Einboden had us do those races to build his ego, but I do think he wanted us to be immersed in competition and that we all lost sight of how that might hurt our final races. My primary problem was with the Monday-Wednesday-Friday hard workout routine. The typical runner who didn't do what they were supposed to on the weekend was pretty much able to keep up with this. We were all supposed to do a long run on the weekend, though, which meant either doing it the day after a hard workout or the day before a hard workout. That's pretty taxing on the body. The two races per week thing is something I don't even want to get started on, because it's so obviously bad for us, but I was just as guilty of enjoying it as any coach. I agree that they should have focused on making SMAC meets bigger and fewer. That would have allowed coaches to include an invitational or two without hurting anyone.

It seems as though you are both on the same page as I am concerning how high school awards should be displayed. Road race awards won in high school are probably okay, but team plaques are probably a bit much to display. I've even decided against mounting my road race awards (including the more recent ones) on the eventual "Wall of Running" down in the basement, because it seems really self-centered. Instead, there may be a shelf in the office. That will be about as far as I go, though. My parents were kind of hovering in the vicinity as I cleaned out the box. At several points they stopped me from callously throwing away even older awards (e.g., middle school track ribbons, or 8th grade basketball trophies/plaques). I can see one day wanting to show my uninterested kids my high school stuff, but I think it would be just plain weird to show-off, "Your old man won 110% AND Most Christian Attitude in the middle school parochial school league!" The plaques from high school will probably just end up in a box in the attic, I imagine.

I would display my awards if we had a more appropriate place to sit them out. I don't like that I've gotten worse, though, and would rather have a few more recent ones, because otherwise it really looks like I'm living in the past. This reminds me that we may be overdue for another dispensation of The Runnies.

I have a small and growing urge for Bon Buffet tonight. I don't know why. I'm on my own for dinner and cannot decide what to eat. It's easy to justify going to a buffet, because in theory there is healthy food available, too.

My #1 interest in a Garmin Forerunner is to get my instantaneous pace. I have some questions along those lines. It's my understanding that I can set the watch to permanently display my pace. I can ask it to give me a current pace or I can set it to tell me my pace per a pre-determined increment of distance (lap). Could I perhaps set that distance to as little as 100m? My understanding is that the current pace setting is not 100% accurate and that checking increments are more reliable, in which case I would want to use smaller periods as my increments. If I could go as low as 100m increments, then I would only need to hold a pace for 20-some seconds in a race (30-some in training) to allow the watch to display a very accurate pace. What's the best way to get a reliable pace using the Forerunner? And is it actually that reliable? I really don't care about anything else the watch does. The HRM is a little intriguing to me on the newer models, but only to better define what is an easy or hard day when I'm out there supposedly running such a thing.

I use nothing but the instantaneous pace feature. The only drawback I find is that it can take awhile to catch up if you're rapidly shifting paces. For instance, if I'm doing a Fartlek run where I'll suddenly go from an 8:30/mi pace to a 5:30/mi pace, it has to count down through the paces, going 8:15/mi ... 7:50/mi ... 7:34/mi ... 6:20/mi ... 5:30/mi. And by the time it gets down to registering 5:30/mi, the Fartlek spurt is over and I'm back to running 8:30/mi. Also, though this may just be an idiosyncrasy of my particular watch, the pacing feature is sometimes interfered with by trees, particularly when I'm on a wooded trail. Like I'll clearly be running a pace sub-9:00/mi, but it will suddenly read something absurd like 13:00/mi. I'm thinking trees and such block the GPS reception.

Would it be pretty stupid to try and be a shoeless runner these days? I suppose that would largely depend on where you live. I come across a lot of broken bottles in my time up here. That being said, it’s not like I’ve ever picked up a nail or anything in my shoes. I was just thinking about how cool it would be to show up to a road race and run it without shoes (of course, setting aside having to go back to square one in terms of training). (This comes from a conversation that Joe, Alden, Val and I started on Saturday.)

I wrote a novella the other day to a friend who linked me an article about shoes and barefeet running (that was also linked in the RA forums). The important point to make is that our feet have grown accustomed to whatever we've done for years past. This means our feet are accustomed to shoes and even specific types of shoes. It's not too late to re-train our feet, but it requires a slow build up. There are "socks" you can wear to give your feet more protection while still simulating the barefoot motion, but I'll go ahead and tell you that you're local running store does not stock them, so good luck finding them online. People rave about how few injuries they receive after switching to barefoot, but I think their lack of injury has just as much to do with their cautious mileage buildup as it has to do with anything else. If you had to pick from birth, I'm inclined to think barefoot would be better, since it's how we evolved. I took specific note of the terrain quality when I ran in my neighborhood the other day. On Willows RD along one stretch of a mile of road, I saw about 5 different places where glass had been shattered in the shoulder of the road and that kind of sealed the deal for me there. I also saw a screw in a parking lot at St. Mary's College the other day. I'm not sure how well a foot callous can stand up to those sorts of things as compared to shoe rubber, but I'm not too eager to find out. I will tell you that my feet sometimes hurt just walking around the apartment barefoot or if I'm ever outside barefoot for whatever reason. I happen to think a little bit of barefoot exercise would help me in those regards. When I asked at the running store about the barefoot running accessories, I was mostly asking because of an interest to strengthen my overall foot fitness and not because I plan to make the transition.