Are you smarter than a marathoner?

It's spring-like in Hog Heaven today: temps in the 50s under sunny skies.  The only fly-in-the-unseasonable-ointment is the March wind that's gusting up to 40 mph.  I celebrated by doing a hill workout.  The wind was from the south and the hill is on an east-west axis.  So, the wind wasn't much of a factor.  I did 6 x .5 mile hills at a 5K effort.  Short of a 5K pace but not by much.  So, I'm getting stronger on the hills at least.  Counting my warm-up and cool-down jogs, I logged almost 9 miles.  Not a bad workout.  Tomorrow will be a slow-and-easy one-hour recovery/maintenance run. 

Joke of the Day
How many marathon runners does it take to change a light bulb?
Marathon runners aren’t afraid of the dark.

Shoe Update:  I retired a well-worn pair of ASICS GT-2150 shoes Sunday.  They were still in serviceable condition but had accumulated 517 miles.  That seems like a lot to me.  I'm hard on shoes and they tend to wear out/break down in various ways between 300 and 400 miles.   I have no idea how many miles a training shoe can safely handle, but I'd rather err on the side of caution.  I'll replace the GT-2150s with a new pair of their immediate successor, the GT-2160 that I bought on sale before Christmas.  The latest shoe in the series, the GT-2170 is already out, but I want to take a look at other models, the ASICS Gel-Neo 33 for example, before committing to another pair of the GT series.

Right now, I need to put more miles on the Brooks PureFlow that I picked up last Thanksgiving at the Amica Seattle Marathon expo.  I've only run in them twice, but I love the fit and the feel on the road and hope that they turn out to be durable.  If so, I'll keep them in my shoe rotation and perhaps add the Brooks PureGrit as a trial shoe.  Before I buy the PureGrit though, I'd like to see the new Saucony Kinvara TR, a trial-running cousin of the popular Kinvara.  Both the PureGrit and Kinvara TR can be classified as minimalist shoes.  The PureGrit weighs in at 8.9 oz. and the Kinvara TR at 8.5 oz. (For men's size 9)

I'm not sure when the Kinvara TR is coming out, but Saucony is rolling out the new Kinvara 3 in early May.  I expect that the Kinvara TR won't be far behind.

I already have a pair of the Kinvara 2 shoes in my rotation, and they're great, but I'm concerned about their durability.  So far, my concern is intuitive, not concrete.  As in no evidence.  So, we'll see.  Right now, I'm using them exclusively for speed work, but I'm considering wearing them for the Colorado Marathon.  The alternative is the ASICS Speedstar 5 that I ran in for the Seattle Marathon and the Capital City (Olympia, WA) Marathon last year.