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I’ve been reading about the similarities, strengths and weaknesses of both. I am drawn to the design centric features of Gowalla but it seems that Foursquare has a bigger user base right now. What are your thoughts?

On February 27th I ran my first marathon at Fort Yargo State Park. The race was the Thrill in the Hills trail run that is put on by Dirty Spokes Productions. The race started off at around 30°F, but warmed up fairly fast leaving the rest of the race at the perfect running temperature.

The event consisted of a half and full marathon. The marathon was two laps around the course. Luckily the turn off to continue on to the second lap did not run right past the finish like for the half but bypassed it slightly. I ended with a time of 4:34 which I was fairly pleased with considering it was my first marathon, with no training, and being sick the week before the race. The winning time for the marathon was 3:31.

Train & Prepare… Or Just Do It

Most of the time people prepare for months to run a marathon. While I am a triathlete, I did not do any training specifically geared towards running a marathon. I had been planning on running the half marathon and decided the week before to go ahead and do the full.  To top things off I was sick the week before the race—in the end though, it did force me to taper and rest.  I had been wanting to run a marathon for a while but I had been putting off and making excuses that I would wait until I had more time to train, or when I wasn’t as busy, etc… Two things led me to forget all of my excuses and go ahead and do the marathon:  Charlie Engle and Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run.  Charlie Engle is a an ultra endurance athlete who, along with Ray Zahab and Kevin Lin, ran 4,300 miles for 111 days straight across the entire continent of Africa.  The runners journey is documented in Running the Sahara.  I was able to attend the Atlanta premiere of the movie and meet Charlie.  I am especially fond of his motto in life “do something now”—don’t make excuses, don’t wait around, just go out and do it. Douglas McDougall’s book Born to Run is full of endurance running goodness. Carried by the wonderful tale of the race of a lifetime he talks about everything from the Tarahumara Indians, to the problems with modern running shoes, to how humans evolved as distance runners—how we were literally born to run.  Born to Run and Running the Sahara are extremely informative and motivational. I cannot recommend them more.

Vibram FiveFingers

In 2008 I discovered Vibram’s revolutionary shoe, the FiveFingers. Before I had only experimented with barefoot running on a turf running track. But after doing some research and coming across runners such as Barefoot Ted, who run ultra marathons barefoot or in FiveFingers, I knew I had to have a pair of FiveFingers. It took me a while to get used to running in the FiveFingers as my legs and feet adapted to finally running correctly. It was not until this past fall that I began almost exclusively running in my FiveFingers.

I knew I wanted to run the marathon in my FiveFingers, but the Sprint model I had did not provide great traction on muddy or wet surfaces. Luckily Vibram recently released the new KSO Trek with an aggressive tread designed for trail running. The KSO Trek uses kangaroo leather for both the liner and upper.  The leather creates an amazing fit and feel. The KSO Treks performed great during the race.  The only problem I had was that on the second half of the race it seemed like my feet were sliding forward ever so slightly and my pinky toes were starting to get squished. This was fixed for the most part by tightening the strap and could have been due to that fact that I was also wearing some Injini socks which aren’t as grippy against the leather liner as bare feet. I wore the socks mostly for warmth since the run started out so cold.  I had also previously injured one of my pinky toes trail running.  Overall the Treks performed great and I had no knee or joint pain of any kind during the race—I’ve actually had no problems at all since I started running in FiveFingers.

All in all the race was awesome (by awesome I mean: great for the first 15 miles, ok from 16-19, re-evaluating my relationship with pain from 20-23, and starring “The Wall” in the face from 24-26.2…) and I cannot wait for the next challange.  Ironman and ultra marathon are next on my list.