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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I've been having a bit of trouble with my shoes recently. As most of you know I totally love my Vibram Five Fingers and run in then religiously. Well almost.

The problem is that running long distances on road or on hot tarmac becomes painful. Afternoon 10km+ runs invariably lead to blisters and after about 15km in the mornings I don't feel that I have anything - rubber or flesh -  between me and the road. Trails they are superb at though and that's what they're made for.

With the aim of doing lots of marathons this year they aren't going to let me go the distance and so I needed a new pair of shoes. My trusty New Balance shoes are quite heavy and I want to try and maintain as much of the minimalist feel as possible. So after reading a bit about them I end up going shopping for some Nike Free 3.0.

Two problems - totally uneducated shop assistants and and no Nike Free 3.0's around. So I decided for the first time in my life to believe the Nike hype and try a pair. Bad mistake. A 12km early morning run left me with a huge blister on the front of my right toe where I have never had a blister before. Not nice. I put it down to the old socks I was wearing (still have to throw them out) and tried again for a 2 hour run on Sunday. The rubbing was really noticeable and I gave up after less than 500m took the shoes off and headed home barefoot. Bliss

Paul Lee and Keat Song suggested a few alternatives and I ended up speaking to Frank who distributes K-Swiss in Malaysia. So at Burger King at lunchtime I tried a pair on. The pair I tried and bought were the K-Ona C.

Apparently they're all the rage with famous triathletes and are designed specifically for triathlons.

One of the things I was mindful of is the fact that I tend to lose toenails after marathons - probably because my feet swell a bit and the toe front bangs and bangs and bangs. So I needed enough space. The first pair felt really comfortable but I( wasn't sure about the space available. The second pair was much better.

My first feeling was that they were very light and comfortable. The second that they were really cool. I could feel the air on my toes. Looking closely I could see lots of air vents at the toe and the heel. Then when I turned them over there were a number of bottom air vents. You can just see them on the last photo - to the right and left of the K-Swiss logo and then 8 more on the fore foot.

This was a bit of a wow moment for me. One of the problems I have as a westerner in Malaysia is that I sweat buckets which means I run in wet shoes and wet socks. Apart from the blister hazard it means that shoes get somewhat heavier during a run. So these bottom holes - together with the ventilation should help my feet stay drier, cooler and more comfortable on long runs.

I've yet to try them in combat and they may go the same way as the Nike's - we'll see. If you're interested in buying a pair have a look at his website 

By the way if anyone wants a pair of Nike Lunarlite + size 42 with only 12km on the clock I'll be happy to pass them on for a small fee.

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I'm home chugging beer. It feels good.

First off I have to thank Senay who is an absolute star for letting me do a marathon on her birthday. Thank you my love.

I was doing this marathon to boost my marathoning skills and also to test my level of fitness. Basically I approached it as a long training run to see how I got on.

My race plan was fairly simple. First half take it easy, next 15 step up the pace, last few k take her home. I was also using a run walk strategy. 9 minutes running and 1 minute walking all the way through to the 36k mark when I'd go into continual running.

Nutrition - I decided to rely on race nutrition with the addition of a caffeinated gel for about the 30km mark. I had a big bowl of oatmeal with sabah honey 2 hours before start and 750ml of go juice in the 1/2 before start.

Kit - I was wearing my new K-Swiss Kona C shoes which had only 12km on the clock. A calculated risk. They felt comfortable and all the alternatives were worse. There was a possibility that they would cause me to DNF if they threw up any serious bio-mechanical problems.

Driving down it was 41 degrees. Oh dear. I had a bit of difficulty finding parking - it didn't help that the 14 pages of printed race instructions were still at home. Still I sorted that out in good time and made it down to the race start. Said hi to Julie Thurston for the first time in the flesh, Keat Song, Frank, Ben who was going to run fast and also Mac and Shazly on the snap attack team. Shazly is selling photos at RM2.99 for the race and well worth the price.

Hot hot hot start and so I decided to keep my plastic water bottle and filled it half full with water. The first 15km went by fairly easily. I was a bit frustrated about slowly falling behind people that I could run faster than but I trusted in the plan and knew that if I kept my patience I'd start knocking them off after the 21km.

There was an nice breeze which made the heat bearable but by the half way point it was dark for a while and the heat was less of an issue. We got sprayed with water by the firemen which was nice but it was cooler by then.

I was still carrying my water bottle at this point and topping it up top the 1/2 way point at every aid station. Water to start with and then a mix of Gatorade and water. Gatorade is disgusting acidic stuff and really kills your stomach. Yuck.

Shortly after the firemen I needed a pee - first and only - it felt good but due to the lack of light I couldn't do a colour check. I also started seeing people coming back the other way. This occupied me for the next hour or so until i realised that we weren't doing a circuit but rather a convoluted out and back. Wish I'd read the map better.

I was also starting to get a little bit bugged by the lack of km markers. I'd last seen one at 14km in the light and it was now dark and I was sure that in 40 minutes or so I should have seen the 15km. Eventually I reached the turnaround - well I guess that's what it was because of the timing mats. I'd started to pick the pace up a little bit on the approach to the turnaround and felt very comfortable.

For the next 10-12km it was great. I kept knocking one person after the other out and then hunting down the next. I had a good cadence with no particular discomfort. The lack of singage was making it difficult to judge my pace - I was also using my iPhone to measure my walk breaks. By about 30km these were become a necessity as my calves and quads were really starting to hurt. I was comfortable with this. High cadence - keep swinging my feet and push through.

I was also starting psych myself up for the speed increase for the last few kilometres - judging when this started was really hard and by now the continual hills were starting to grind me down. I tried to boost the speed but the muscular strength left in my legs wasn't enough and I wasn't prepared to push the pain barrier too much.

Hills degenerated into power walking and then I power walked from about 37km through to 39 1/2km. I then got talking to an English chap which was nice but he was such a whinging pom that at the next drinks station I let out a bellow of rage against the gods and pushed myself forward.

I went fast and just felt my speed bleeding away like I had a cut jugular. Coming down towards the start IO picked up speed and took it into a sprint - but it was a kilometre still to go the finish. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAArgh. Pushed hared through the last kilometre and hurtled into a crowd of 10km's crowding up the finish. Sorry if I hit you but you should't have been in the fuckin way.

Time was about 4:40 but there was no timing clock.  So I have no real idea.

OK. So how did it go? What was I trying to achieve? To get a marathon under the belt - improve confidence - and to check my level of fitness.

I'm happy that I did all of those. Time was a bit outside the 4 - 4 1/2 hour range I was looking for but not too fussed.

I'd done precious little endurance training and had only a few 20km runs under the belt before I did the race. The muscle failure in the last quarter therefore isn't a big surprise. What was interesting is that I can boost up to a hard effort in the water - with heavy breathing - even with dead arms. I couldn't do it on the run. I've missed a few key strength building sessions so who do I have to blame?

Heat? Wasn't too worried by it. The take it easy for the first half made that a non-problem and whilst it cooled from 40 down to 33 degrees during the course of the race I wasn't unduly discomforted by the heat. I used sponges a couple of times but did not feel a huge need for them. I was keen on cold water by the last 10km.

Feet were good - but I'll cover that in a separate review of the K-Ona C's. Arms and shoulders and upper body were stiff by the end of the race - mainly due from the heavy swim training I've been doing. Quads and calves hurt a lot - funny that. :)

Ankles were a little bit sore especially just after the race finish and my arches were unhappy. Knees were also sore. During the race I'd though for a bit that I may have a bit of ITB but that passed as did a bit of cramp in my left calf at about the 18km mark.

So lots of room for improvement but pretty confident that as I increase the training and get more marathons under the belt this year that my times are going to start to come down quickly. I hope so because running non roads is boring.

(Photos courtesy of Snap Attack)

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I always admire Brian (TrainingPayne) who always manages to write huge posts, on a daily basis AND drink beer at night. He's off to Ironman St George in Utah this weekend - good luck Brian and have loads of fun :)

Set against Brian I seem to come up short in my blog posting and again this week I am catching up with a whole week of training. Blah.

So on Friday I was on hard resistance intervals on the turbo. 3 minutes on max gear, max resistance and holding the brakes; then 90 seconds off to recover. 10 Reps make it a tedious and mind numbingly boring exercise but like my treadmill my turbo is on the balcony. So with a 0630 start I watch the day slowly turning from night to dawn to light.

Saturday is meant to be a run day but because I was running on Sunday I swapped it for my bike. Cycling is still a very low priority at the moment as all my big races for the next couple of months are marathons. This is to help me figure out how to start running a sub-4 hour marathon in the heat. So I was meant to do 90 minutes in a high cadence - as it turned out I did about 110. Happy with the 32km/h as I was focusing more on the cadence than on my speed. Nice. As I switch to bike training in the second part of the year I'm going to be looking to start pushing that up towards 35km/h. That's going to be tough and hurt a lot.

Sunday was the week's big event - A training day with the team for the Labourt Day Hash Challenge Marathon. We met at Batu Dam - Julie, Azmar, AJ and me. The original plan was to do 5km trail loops so I'd turned up with lots of bottles of go juice to repower (I'd planned for 3 hours of running). As it turned out we didn't come back to the car and I was truly grateful for Julie carrying a bottle for me. Of course I had to carry the camelbak for half the time :(

After an easy start we decided that trails were boring and spent most of our time going cross country. Great fun. I wouldn't generally have the courage to do it if I was by myself but with 3 others crashing through the undergrowth it was a lot of fun. We kept a good comfortable pace up but didn't manage to complete a circuit - turning back at the 2 hour mark and finishing in about 2 hours 50. A really great trail. Mostly flat along the lake shore and then climbing steadily - with some fast descents  and several river crossings.

Felt pretty good at the end and was surprised that it had been 3 hours. Drank a lot of fluid at the end and had fun flicking leeches off my legs.

Monday was back into the pool for a sprint session. 2 25m easy and then a sprint, repeated 8 times before a 200m sprint. Then repeated. Not the most fun session but one which is quite relaxing and satisfying to complete. This is especially true as the 200m sprints loom very large to start with and then get worse as you know that you are deliberately tiring your arms and lungs out before you get to them. That makes each one that is completed all the more satisfying.

Tuesday was the hardest session this week. It was a 90 minute naegative split. I'm really trying to improve my run so I tried a new method of working out my route. I set a target pace level for each sector and then measured how far I should go in that time and then planned the route on that basis. 

It was a really good run - I fell far short of my target time (by 22 minutes) but I really pushed myself - and I think something I'm starting to learn is accepting the pain as a good thing , not something to be avoided.

Logistics were a little complicated along the way as I stopped for drinks and had to arrange a drop off as well. Knowing the route better I'll stop at petrol stations in future. Got back to Armanee Terrace and collapsed at the guard post - Arif stopped and asked how I was - said I'd done 50 minutes hard. He sid Ok and drove off knowing that there was a reason that I looked like shit. I love it when people understand. :)

Wednesday was back to the pool for 600m efforts. Not the fastest in the world at 13:50 but it was a good session. This was the first of these and the real challenge was to find out what the maximum sustainable pace that I can keep up for 600m. The first and last sets were at easy and the middle three were hard. It was all a matter of adjusting cadence and pull to get the right cadence to kill my arms without putting a huge aerobic stress on my lungs.

Into the pool in the afternoon with Maya who jumped off the side without any buoyancy and then swam to the side with no assistance. Then did it a few more times to prove that it was not ana accident. Cool.

In the evening I decided to go to Yoga and picked something that I couldn't pronounce and can't remember. The idea was a bit of stretching and muscle relaxation. The result was lots of press-ups and bodily twisting. A very intense upper body workout - hard after killing my arms in the morning but enjoyable.

Then we ended up getting pissed. Thursday morning - well the hill intervals were postponed into the evening. We were due to go to friends for a birthday (Happy Birthday Ercument and Nur that Cake was one of the best Birthday cakes I've ever eaten. Yum. Yum.) so I had to go out at 7 despite the rain, thunder and lightening.

TriTwins' Simon has a great blog about training in the rain. After so many years of avoiding it in the UK I was a bit apprehensive but loved it after a few minutes. Especially as my Kona C's with their bottom holes were really good at keeping my feet dry. 

10 sprints up a hill in the dark in the pouring rain with the only illumination from lightening that turned everything an electric blue. Great. I focused on keeping my form good rather than all out speed and generally managed to have a good 45 seconds on each interval with the last 15 becoming increasingly painful. The limiting factor was definitely the aerobic capacity - though I think cadence and leg lift was also decreasing at the end of each interval. A lot of fun - especially walking back to the starting point after each effort. 

Friday morning - kind of taper for the hash marathon tomorrow. I reduced the turbo hard intervals to 5 instead of ten and reduced the intensity by not applying the brakes whilst I was doing them. A nice easy start to the day.

All in all I feel pretty good at the moment. The frightening thing is that I am still in base period. Yikes! Everest Marathon is coming up soon and then I have a couple of months of racing lots of short triathlons. Yeee ha!

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Bought some new kit whilst I was in England. My old trainers had died a death and didn't really fit right. I got some Mizuno ????'s from a running shop in Birmingham in Shirley. Sorry guys I've forgotten the shops name (but I did find them on the internet in Malaysia)

I got to try them out that night (along with another new toy but more of that in a minute) when I went running with the guys from the BRAT club. A few recognised me including Tauny Southwood and Paul Robertshaw. As I was wearing new shoes I decided to run wiuth the C group which ran at a leisurely 10km/h pace. It was great running in a cool temperature after months in Malaysia and I could have probbably upped the pace a bit quitre comfortably.

I chucked the question to Paul, and Debbie Southwood (who's off to Kona via Ironman Switzerland), about hydration strategies in the heat. I got some really good tips. Debbie said that Tauny who sweats a lot has to do about 1lite an hour of electrolytes on a hot course.

One thing that we didn't have to worry about was hydration as it rained the heaviest that I have ever seen in the UK. So I ended up running in sodden brand new trainers. Great fun though and quite satisfying. I've spent a lot of time in the rain over the years from climbing in North Wales and whilst it is unpleasant aren't really too worried by it until I start getting cold.

So we 12k in 71 minutes (10.2km/h) with a heart rate of 147BPM.

As my Forerunner 305 had died I needed a replacement. One of the things that had been worrying me was that the Forerunner 305 doesn't have enough battery power for both the run and cycle legs of the Ironman (well not at my speed) and I was looking at interesting mods beyond my technical competence on the motionbased site.

So I bought an Edge705 for the cycling and a new Forerunner 305. I stayed with the 305 because I like the map feature and also the split screen. Also I couldn't see the point of paying an extra £100 for the 405. The money saved went onto the Edge. I tried the Edge 705 out and it worked great - even has a pretty map. :)

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