Giddy Up!

The thought was planted by reading the Rooster Slam.

Pretty much an impulse buy after thinking about it for 3 weeks.

I was driving back from taking Trisha to the airport heading to a meeting downtown with Ward and Bjorn (good thoughts, food and weather).

As I always do, I got lost driving downtown. Suddenly, I am stuck heading over a bridge...the Morrison Bridge.
The bridge dumped me out directly at Portland Running Company.
From my experience living in Portland, Paula and Dave have been great for the running community so I pulled in, parked, and decided to give them some of my money. Like I really needed an excuse! The store running expert took his time, brought me out about 5 pairs of shoes. I took them all out around the block for a trial run. I quickly narrowed it down between the Asics DS trainers and the Sauconys. Since I was going for fast and light, I ended up with the Sauconys.

With Trisha off to present Seven Years of Teaching Online: Fact and Fantasy at her conference in Minneapolis (or visit friends...I am not sure which) I could even justify buying the shoes to help make me miss her less :-)

They are things of beauty and power: Fast Twitch 2 Endurance

So why racing flats besides the look. I did a little research.
Race flats are exactly that...more flat than regular shoes. The heel is smaller.
This has:

4 principal effects: weight reduction, better foot to ground power transfer, providing less support and giving less cushioning. These features allow a runner to race more efficiently.

and

The common rule of thumb is that you can expect to drop 1 second per mile, for every ounce you shed on your feet.

So my trainers weigh 13.1 oz. and I will race in 7.6 oz. flats, I can hope to run about 5.5 seconds a mile faster for 26.2 miles.

Doing the math: 5.5 * 26.2 = 144 seconds or 2:24.
My current marathon PR is from Boston 2005: 3:02:33
Look at that...remove 2:24 and I am only 10 seconds away from 2:59:59.
Man, I love math, you can make it say anything.

Eugene is flat compared to Boston. There is those 10 seconds. On paper it is a sure thing :-)

On the bottom of the shoe it says "Giddy Up!".
That will be on VISA, please!