Today I called in to Loughborough's newest running shop. Vince Wilson, the proprietor, had been leaving messages on the Barrow Runner's Facebook page over the last few weeks and generally interacting with people in a fairly friendly way. However, the name of the shop - Sportswear Deals - didn't really fill me with confidence that it was an actual running shop. I thought maybe it would be a mini Sports Direct that happened to have some running shoes and was being cleverly marketed by Vince. But it was in my town, so I was certainly going to have a look.
When I arrived through the shop door my first impressions both confirmed my suspicions and pleasantly surprised me. It did have that slight pop-up shop look, with a reasonable but still fairly small selection of 'last-year's' stock. But it was also a running shop, no doubt about it. As if to prove the point, there was a widescreen TV above the counter showing reruns of classic races (Coe and Ovett while I was there). It seems clear that the business model is to sell bargains - last year's models, end of lines etc - but genuinely within the field of running. And the reason for that is Vince. He's an actual runner. We got chatting about barefoot running, and then running in general and it was hard to stop him talking. Phrases like 'when I was training with Crammy' were slipped in liberally, or 'when I was in Kenya and Mo was running along the street'.
It was a thoroughly entertaining 45 minutes and by the end of it I couldn't quite tell whether I'd just met a brilliant salesman with the gift of the gab or a genuine elite runner with a passion for the sport. I now can see he's both. Even if he knew nothing about what he was selling he'd talk you into it, he's just got that character. But he does know what he's talking about. By the end of our chat he'd introduced me to a new training session (the OBLA, or something like that) that he recommended I include rather than just relying on tempo runs. I'll try to explain that one some time. I did of course have to look him up when I got home - 3:42 PB for 1500m. Not bad.
Back to Barefoot
Unfortunately, I'm not quite at the stage for OBLA runs, or tempo runs, or sub 4-min 1500m runs, so I limited myself to 1.7 miles today. Most of it was on grass - I found a field in the village with a circumference of bang on 400m so I was able to do laps of that in my barefoot shoes. Again, I tried to be quite natural and let my feet land how they wanted to. This meant that I felt pretty comfortable by the end. I think, next time, I will run on grass again but shift forward on my feet a little and see how I respond. There's a club session in a couple of days that I can join in with on the grass track, so I'm looking forward to that. Though I am expecting to find the edge has come off my speed work a little over the last few weeks.
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