The Transition to Natural Running:
Brooks PureFlow


They make me a more efficient runner. Proven by nike+.

When early December hit, I needed a new pair of shoes. My Asics Nimbus 13’s were starting to feel real flat after 600 miles. Reading and hype led me to want to try a pair of Brooks Pure Project shoes, but they weren’t available from my regular running store. Brooks decided to offer their shoes only to big box and stores that would carry the whole line from the beginning. While this creates hype and  anticipation from restricted supply, it shuns the stores that foster the sport. So taking a chance I ordered them straight from Brooksrunning.com. Note to Brooks: I will not buy running shoes from ANY big box store: I don’t trust them and they don’t offer realistic return policies for runners. The best I’ll do is try them on there, order them else where.

Review:

Running in Asics for the last 3 years and never liking a single Brooks shoe, I absolutely love this shoe!! The improvements to my gate/stride were immediately noticeable after my first run, where my avg. pace/mile dropped by 30 s.!

After 100 miles:

My pace is steadily 7:30/mi , even when I go out with the intent of a slow recovery run and don’t look at my watch for the whole 5 miles, I’m still 15 s/mi faster than my November runs. I am starting to feel some arch pain after my runs behind the ball of my left foot. A month before I bought the shoes I decided to try to crank 180 miles before the end of the year to hit 1,000 miles. Given the increase in my mileage since I bought the shoes, the transition to minimal running footware, and the amount of treadmill running i’m doing now this is not surprising in the least. I plan to push through and see how it goes.

Lessons learned:

Landing more forefoot feels exhilerating, much faster and lighter on your feet. Each stride, push off I can feel my foot and toes separate and launch. 

At this point I don’t think I’d go back to anything else, I’m totally hooked! Every stride feels right, every push off feels powerful. This is what running is supposed to feel like. It’s natural and I dig it!

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Brooks PureFlow


Safari 4 Public Beta: ROCKS!

button-download-icon-20090217

Apple released Safari 4 Public Beta on Tuesday. I of course downloaded and installed it as soon as I realized it was available. I have to just say, it Rocks!

For a while now I’ve been using Safari to surf the web, due to it’s superior speed loading pages over even Firefox 3. However I use Firefox for designing and developing websites since the plugin Firebug is so much more helpful than Safari 3’s built in development tools.

But Safari 4 changes that!

Safari’s new built in development tools allow the same live page edits, adjustments and inspection that Firebug enables. There is also a built in page weight and load speed tab, which is very useful in optimizing your pages. Also the Javascript debugger and load time evaluation of page assets surpasses Firebug. This single handedly makes Safari my new favorite web browser!!

page load time panel

page load time panel

— Update —

I’ve been using the Safari 4 beta for almost a month now and I have nothing but more good things to say about it. I can’t wait to see: What Google does in the mac version of ‘Chrome’; If Firefox 3.3 is as fast and great as the growing hype; The downfall of dominating loaner Internet Explorer.

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