I bought some K-Swiss Kona-C's recently. I liked them because their light weight and cool design. However I've only done 12km in them. Not much for a proper review and so I've waited until I actually used them in combat.


It was a bit dangerous to use them in the Energizer Night Marathon. 12km of training is not really enough to allow them to settle in and figure out what problems if any I'd have.


One of the things that made me worry is that although the Kona-C's are stability there isn't quite enough stability for me and my feet tend to fall in a bit more than I'm used to. One question was whether to use orthotics in them or use the existing insoles. Using orthotics with a stability shoe is dangerous - I've been crippled by ITB before by having stability shoes to combat my pronation AND orthotics.  Not something I'll do willingly again and so I decided to run in the Kona-C's as is.


On my previous run I'd also felt that the padding was very thin and that the balls of me feet get very sore quite quickly - 10km+. Would this lead to an agonising marathon?


Everything went really well on the foot basis. From about 15km  - 18km I had a hotspot under my right big toe but that then went away. I also have a blister on the front of my right big toe just by the toenail - didn't realise until Senay checked my feet at home. That was originally cause by the crap Nike trainers and is probably not to do with the K-Swiss.


I suffered quite a lot of foot compression as my arches didn't have the support that they were used to and this resulted in feet that ached and felt a bit unnatural at the end of the race - think of Chinese footbinding . . . However there was no real impact on the race itself. 


Equally my ankles suffered from the under stability that I needed and were sore from providing the additional support as were my knees. However my legs had sufficient strength to compensate for this and it's a reasonable cost for racing in a pair of untested shoes. 


I am a heavy sweater and one of the reasons why I like the Kona-C's is the drainage channels in the bottom of the shoe. I've no evidence that sweat was squirting out the bottom of the sole through the race - but I never noticed the shoes once I started running. They felt really light and compared to most of my other shoes they STAYED light. 


Compared to many shoes there is not a lot of water absorbing fabric and I've found that with other shoes the combination of sweat and ice sponges can really make it a chore of lifting your feet up. No problem here. This made my high cadence strategy workable. 


I think that I will probably buy another pair but with neutral support so that I can use my orthotics in them. 


So all in all I'm pleased with the shoes and will make them a permanent part of my race repertoire. 

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Friday Night and it was negative splits on the treadmill. Tonight 30m easy followed by 30m moderate. I did the first half at 7mph (11kmh) and the second at 9mph (14.5km) with a 5 minutes kicker of 12mph (19.3kph) to round off the hour. I totally forgot to see how far I ran but I guess it was in the region of 8 miles (12kmh)

[sorry about the miles - I still haven't figure out how to change the machine to work in km]

The lazy bit cam when I decided i couldn't be bothered to run in trainers and as it wasn't a challenging run and I wasn't going to sweat that much I could do it barefoot.

One of the hard things about this run is to maintain a high cadence 90+ throughout. Wih weeks of practice I'm managing to keep this above 90 and once I've warmed up a bit into the mid 90's. On the home run it was consistently over 100 and probably average 105.

Here's a nice video of some barefoot running



Two good things to note - look at the way that he runs much more on the front of his foot. Not much heel strike. The other is the delicacy and rapidity of foot placement especially over rocky areas.

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Another big catchup blog. Life is a bit busy at the moment and the blog has suffered.

Genting Sempah - Saturday

Saturday morning I headed out to Genting for my first bike ride in a year. I drove up and up and up towards the Orang Asli hospital but couldn't find it. Thinking that I might have driven past it and not wanting to miss out on the climbing I stopped and got everything together. 200m after starting to cycle I came round the corner and there was the hospital. :)

I was aiming to go up in as big a gear as possible and for most of the time I was on the 3 hardest gear of my 52-42. It was only after the bridge on one of the last tough corners that I shifted down. I spent most of the climb with a chap called Nizam from Taman Melawati  chatting away which was nice and I think kept both of us going faster than otherwise.

It was a good ride and I reached the road junction after 51 minutes  which was pleasing. Slow on the way down though as I wasn't comfortable with cornering and a bit shaky with my controls. I got used to it after a while.

Fallout 3 - Sunday

Well I'd intended to go running on Sunday morning but I'd started playing fallout 3 on Saturday afternoon. Senay and Maya were away and I had no other plans. as midnight on Sunday approached I realised that the run probably wasn't going to happen. I'd reached level 14 though :)

Work - Monday

Monday was a shit day at work. Lots of things went wrong; I was desperate for my swim by the time I headed off at 1500 for it. So my card didn't work in the car park and the attendant wasn't around. Trapped I went back upstairs to sort it out and got caught with more fire fighting. Leaving work just before 7 I was in 2 minds as to whether to go or not. Feeling guilty; not wanting to do it; needing to do it. So it started raining heavily. I went home.

TTDI Trail Running - Tuesday

I got up and couldn't face doing one of my usual routes. Boring - I'd done them all too many times  before. So I headed down to TTDI to do circuits there. The first one of the little park took 7 minutes. Running round another 8 times seemed miserable so I took a detour and headed up onto the mountain bike trails used for the Saloman Xtrail run.  Mondays are moderate uphill efforts and fast downhills. I followed the same route of the Salomon Xtrail run along the side of the jungle so I didn't get lost. I'd forgottent how long that initial climb was. Hard work - It must have certainly seperated out the racers during the run. I remember lungs burning by the time I reached the half way point.

Today it was easier. Lots of fallen trees and I wasn't  going at race pace. I was wearing my VFF's and was having to pay a lot of care and attention to where I was placing my feet. I got to where the first drinks stand had been and stopped for 30s before heading back downhill.

My coach has been telling me to run fast with a very high cadence downhill. On this trail and with my VFFs it really worked. It gave me lots of flexibility and control and I flew down. Landed on my ass and scraped my legs and arms. Whoops. Really good fun running - but actually hard to push myself to run at a hard pace over rough ground like that. I need to do lots more trail running.

Balcony Bike - Wednesday

Onto the 55-42 on the turbo. First thought was this was heavy. After a while though it wasn't so bad. A bit like swimming with paddles. Did my 50 minutes and really worked my legs and also my lungs every 3 rep. Pleased. Started dreaming of a power meter.

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Before I get an irate call from my wife I should mention that the 'hotties' were my feet!

In a well meaning attempt to clear up the Christmas leftovers I polished off an unanted bottle of chilled red wine and a couple of beers that had more than a year before their best before date. Getting up this morning was a bit of a struggle. So instead of going for a run I stayed in bed and read.

Evening runs always get killed off by work or family commitments and so I headed out at lunchtime. No clouds, lots of sun. I was wearing my fingers again which I am growing to love running in. Barefoot running is a lot more natural and enjoyable than wearing a Nike prison cell on each foot.

The insulation isn't great though and with my blistering pacing, a lightning cadence and a hot road my feet were soon sweating and feeling the pain. I headed out to Flora Damansara, up through Bukit Lanjan and then took a quick trip up to the Penchala tunnel before heading back to Mofaz on the LDP and up the final hill into Damansara Perdana for iced water at TBB. Thank you Daniel.

Good run. I hit 6 hills each a bit more slowly than the last but as pleased with how my cadence was. It got very hard towards the end of the 50 minutes and I really wanted to stop and walk. Especially as the seams were giving me big raw patches on my feet.

Runnning at lunchtime is great though. Firstly people look at you as if you are mad. More importantly a lot of triathlons end up with you running late morning, lunchtime or afternoon. In the heat. So if you only train in the cool of the morning you're not really preparing well.

Plus for an orang putih like me the heat always kills my running in races. Better to take my pain now and learn to dish it right back out.

Running along the white lines and thinking of Badwater. Bad idea.

Comments welcome

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Went out for a run after my sports massage this morning. It was only a 30 minute effort with a couple of strides and it was relxed and fun. I ran out to the Honda showroom at Wisma Mofaz.

I started off thinking about Chi running and ran at a speed that felt comfortable and let it increase as my body chose rather than I chose. The first 500m went a lot better than usual. I was trying to be much more awrae of my body and improve my form. Very difficult. Some of the things that I was focusng on were thinking about my cadence - trying to get a few more footfalls per minute, thinking about my posture - standing straighter and trying toget my body into alignment, leaning forward when running downhill - my speed went up with no appreciable effort though it felt like I was falling whilst taking baby steps.

All in all pretty good and I enjoyed the session.

4.6km in 28.26 minutes at 9.7km/h and an average heartrate of 133bpm. Average cadence was 81.

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