Deena Kastor Training for Beijing

[Ted Leblow]

A quote from Deena on her preperation for Beijing from her journal. You can read the whole thing at the link below.

http://www.nyrr.org/races/pro/usa_distance/deenakastor.asp

"Beijing is only eight months away. Between now and then I will log over five thousand miles. I will go through 15 pair of DS Trainers. I will take 200 ice baths. I will log 600 hours of afternoon naps. I will get more than 200 massages and have a total of about 1000 acupuncture needles. All this in an effort to maintain health and get as strong as possible."

"Along with training hard and intensely taking care of myself I hope to stay connected with the simple joys that have kept me running for the past 24 years. I hope to still hear my feet landing on pine needles. I hope to maintain playfulness as I toy around with a faster cadence. I hope to weave through the trees and feel the rhythm of my breath. I hope to notice the seasons changing. I hope I still jump at the chance to chase a leaf blowing down the street. I hope to be aware enough to feel sweat starting to gloss my neck. I hope to playfully hop over rocks and roots without breaking pace. The greatest thing I can ask for is to be joyfully running my way to Boston and Beijing. Greater still would be that our entire Running USA team will be together on that flight to China this summer."

Ok, if you do a little math and assume she wrote this with about 33 weeks to Beijing it means she will average about 150 miles a week, take an ice bath almost daily, get a massage almost daily, nap 2-3 hours every day, change shoes every 333 miles, and have about 120 needles stuck in her every month. I do like the second part about keeping things fun and making sure to appreciate the journey.

[Kory Wheatley]

15 pairs of DS Trainers that insane, but with the high mileage you would need to change more frequent.

[Sasha Pachev]

I would probably do all of her mileage in one pair of shoes :-)

[Josse]

I would probably do all of her mileage in one pair of shoes :-)

You can put over 5000 miles on one pair of shoes?  Man I'm jelous.

[Sasha Pachev]

I wear shoes until I start feeling the ground through a hole or until a new pair lands on me somehow. Lately new pairs have been landing on me before the last one would get to the holes. However, I believe my record is running in the same pair from December 1993 to September 1996 averaging 40-45 miles a week. I just did a calculation (for the geeks, using the to_days() MySQL function) and it comes out to at least 5600 miles on one pair of shoes. I had two injuries in that period of time. The first one was three days after I got the new shoes, and I was not wearing them to earn it. Being in America for the first time, and having bought a new pair of spikes I was anxious to try them and did an 8 K tempo run on the track. This gave me a sore knee and reduced me to jogging for a month. The second injury was a 1-2 punch during the relatively early period part of this period - June 1994. I ran 11 miles on a skewed road, and then did 5x1000 in spikes on the track the next day. This gave me a pinched nerve in the lower back, which reduced me to about 3 weeks of painful jogging.

[Dallen]

Sasha, maybe you have chronic back issues because of all that running in worn out shoes.

[Kory Wheatley]

Sasha I love the Mysql query, I use that function all the time.  I'm a firm believer in changing your shoes after 400 miles and also rotating between at least 3 pairs of shoes.  I currently rotate with 3 - 4 right now, and their all a different brand of shoe, (Saucony, Asics, Avia, and Mizuno).  Sometimes I will go to 500 miles depending on if I know I can do it with that shoe.

[Kory Wheatley]

Sasha, do you have a pair of marathon shoes that you only wear for marathon's, or is this also your trainer shoe as well?

[Sasha Pachev]

Dallen:
I have considered this. However, if this was the case, then many Russian runners of my generation would have had similar problems. We could not afford to change shoes every 400 miles. In fact, we could rarely get our hands on anything that looked like a modern running shoe. They gave us a decent pair of spikes, but when it came to running on the roads, it was either basketball shoes, tennis shoes, or one brand of Adidas (Maria would know exactly which one I am talking about :-) ) if you were lucky, and you held on to that pair until the sole started to crumble because it would be awhile before you could get your hands on another. I was not different from other kids that went on to race at a higher level later on in the way of wearing shoes, but rather in that between the ages of 12.5 and 14 I did 4 speed workouts a week, and October through April it took place on a 200 meter indoor track with high banks on the curves. They did maybe 2 a week, and theirs was something like 4x200 while mine was 30x200 or a 6000 tempo run at 5:45/mile pace.

Kory:

When I can have shoes in reasonable abundance (which has been the case in the couple of years), I use one pair for easy runs, and another light racing flat pair for anything faster than 6:00 pace.