Day 3,027: The shoes I've been looking for (Saucony Iso Zealot)

On Sunday, I went for a semi-easy run with the wife up North Highland Avenue to the PATH trail to the Eastside Beltline.

Since she was pushing the double stroller, I wore the shoes that I usually wear when I'm not stroller-runnin' -- my Skechers Go Run 3s. These are the shoes that I've been doing intervals and racing in since last month, when I retired my Skechers Go Run 2s.

The last time she ran this way was during December's Inman Frosty 5K, and muscle memory must have been kicking in since we did Mile 3 in 8:58 and the last mile at 9:06. During that time, however, I could feel tinges in my right knee, which for me typically is a sign that my shoes have reached their limit.

Those shoes only have a little more than 230 miles on them, but I have heard that minimalist shoes have to be replaced sooner. I put more than 500 miles on my Saucony Kinvara 5s that I used to train for last fall's marathon(s) but my Go Run 2s only had 320 miles on them before they made comfortable slippers around the house.

So today I dug out a $10 off coupon and went over to Big Peach Running Co. and picked up the Saucony Iso Zealot, a shoe that attracted me three months ago when I heard about them from the running store's email.

Basically these shoes have more cushioning than the Kinvaras, which I wanted since it was not fun to roll over a rock on the road when I was training. They have the same 4mm drop as my other minimalist shoes and weigh a little more than the Kinvara at 8.3 ounces.

I see these shoes as my primary shoe to run in when I am not pushing a stroller. Since my Go Run 3s also were my main racing shoe, I decided to look into some more reviews and ended up buying online the Saucony Type A6 racing flat.

I haven't had a pair of racing shoes since 1998, when I bought a cool-looking pair of Nike cross-country racing shoes -- and proceeded to wear them unbroken in a 5K in the Chicagoland area. Needless to say I didn't wear them very much after that.

This will be an interesting experiment, since these shoes weigh 5.1 ounces and are said to have more firmness for racing, something that led me to ultimately run in my Nike Zoom Air Pegasus 31s last October in the Marine Corps Marathon instead of the Kinvara 5, which I did much of my training in. I felt at the time that the firmness in the Nike shoes helped me late in races, which is something that the softer feel of the Kinvaras did not.