red neck surgery

Left shoe in the first picture, without any modification. Right shoe in the second picture with the "toe expansion" modification.

Performed emergency surgery on the pair of New Balance 1023's I bought at Athelete's House on Monday. Got the idea from a blog I'd read earlier in the week. This woman cut the whole toe box off of her shoe because of some kind of toe issue. My surgery wasn't as drastic, but it had to be precise. I have one foot that is slightly larger than the other. When I tried on a size 9.5 they were just to big and the size 9 seemed to fit better. That's my street shoe size, but most all running shoes I wear a 9.5. First run in the new pair and I knew they were to small. Made some adjustments to the lacing and tried again on track day. Still didn't work, actually developed a blister under my big toe and had to drain it for the next 2 days. This mornings surgery was simply a x cut right wear the big toe makes contact with the shoe. Worked like a charm on the run this morning. Though I was late for the workout and the guys left without me.

RunningAhead has integrated the ability to upload your run data directly from your Garmin GPS onto their server. This sounds great, but it took forever to load this morning. I didn't read the part where you have to turn on the Garmin to do the upload. Ooops. Came in pretty quick afterwards. Haven't played with it to much. It did bring 2-3 of the same workouts and some old bike stuff. That's odd, I'd deleted all of the old workouts so I should have only had a 2 months worth of runs. Didn't realize the bike stuff had to be deleted separately?

Good interview with Kara Goucher regarding mental toughness. Best quote is Salazar saying he's a wimp. Holy crap, mister duel in the sun. (great book)