Running Academy and I

Had a great time this  morning. Instead of going for my normal Easy run this morning in my Merrell Road Glove, I decided to join the Running Academy at Lake Garden, jointly organized by Skechers Malaysia and KuMoves. The workshop is conducted on every 2nd and 4th Sunday of the month and registration can be done at here. They start the workshop at 7.30am and I was there by 7.15am. I was surprised to find that the parking was nearly full! Apparently there's 2 entrance and I've headed to one of the more popular one. I'll try the other one next time round.

While there, I bumped into Lorna Roderick nee Wong and Markus Kus who's part of KL Runners. It was a nice and pleasant surprise, especially after I found out they're helping out with the Workshop. There were quite a bunch of us there, approximately 15, with a healthy mix of Noobs like me, and more experienced people.

Apparently I got into their 4th session where they have a performance check/challenge going on. We started off with a 2K warm up where we had a group of runners chasing another, kind of like Police and Thief. Once caught, the one chased became the chaser. We follow that up with other games to get the heart rate up. What really got to me was the stairs repeat. 10 years of lack of exercise really catch up to you then. My quads tightened up and I had difficulties coming down the stairs. Needless to say, I'm pretty much bummed after that :P

I would say that, the workshop is very very nice, with lots of information and different type of exercises which you can pick  up and incorporate into your ordinary routine. It may however be a tad tough to newcomers. We had a bunch of early leavers and a girl that stayed for all the exercise emptied her breakfast after a very valiant effort to hold it in.

To people who sees this as a challenge to overcome, and as a new baseline  to work on and get better at, this is a good workshop to come for. Personally, I found out the weaker points of myself where I need to improve on in 1 session and will be working on it to get better.  For others however, they may get the wrong impression whereby this workshop is not too friendly/useful for new runners. Don't get me wrong, the organizers are nice and friendly and I can see that they are trying to make things fun and interesting to the runners. It's just that some newer runners than me may find it a bit tough to keep up.

Hopefully the organizer can address this issue especially since it's in their agenda to get people to run again. Looking forward to more sessions and more people joining in the workshop.

Interesting article on shoes and pronation

Just finished reading an article on RunBlogger title Neutral Running Shoes Need not be the Goal for all Runners. The article is mainly about our obsession with Pronation Control (you can read more about it here in this article).

In a way, I'm lucky not to be sucked into that sort of mindset since I just started running and went out to buy a pair of new shoes which I felt comfortable in (yeah, I'll try and write a review on it soon). I'm lucky in the sense that I had no idea what I am looking for and the store clerk was not overly convincing in selling me any of their "running shoes". I stumbled upon my current pair literally when I was walking out of the store.

I WILL say that I understand what Pete Larson meaning on the following:

" I would also agree that comfort is hard to define, but for me I think it’s mainly just how good a shoe is at letting my body do its thing without getting in the way – a comfortable shoe is one that I barely even notice when I run." 

I've recently had that experience in another pair of shoes. While trying it on in the store, there's always a niggling reminder of the shoe due to the presence of a pretty high arch curve on the inside shoes. I was a little worried that it will affect me on my run. I was however put at ease after running in the shoes for a bit as I totally forgot about the shoes and was enjoying myself a lot. I'll talk more about this shoes when I put more mileage in it. In the meantime, enjoy the article.