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Let me tell you a funny story.

First, check out today’s stats.

Aren’t they amazing? I beat my previous best mile by a full 56 seconds. Better, I dropped my average mile speed by over a minute! How about that? Go me! I rule, huh?

Well, not quite.

I went to Brighton today. My wife had won a day of luxurious pampering at a top spa and took the day off work to go. Brighton is the only place I can pick up copies of Triathlete and Inside Triathlon (both are imports) and it’s also a good place for sports stores, so I thought I’d tag along as well, at least on the journey up - after that, we were both on our own.

Before I went, I remembered that Brighton used to have a specialist running shop and after a quick Google, there it was - The Jog Shop. It took me a little while to track it down (not helped by the fact that there are two George Streets in the Brighton area) but once there I was glad I did. Very friendly service. The chap who served me, who I think was the manager, spent a lot of time looking at my feet, gait and style, and after we chatted for a moment about where I’m at he brought out about eight pairs of running shoes for me to try.

His first choice was a pair of Brooks, which caused me to recoil a little. I understand that they’re meant to be half-decent shoes, but they’re just so ugly that there is no way I’d be seen wearing them, let alone part with that kind of money. I feared at first that this was going to be my only choice - this is the shoe that you should buy and that’s all there is to it - but he assured me that he was simply seeing if they were the right type of shoe for my feet, which they were. Thankfully, there were several other options.

After trying them all on and doing mini-jogs around the store, I narrowed it down to a pair of Asics, Saucony and Nike. I love Nike stuff. I pretty much always buy Nike, but over the last few weeks I’ve grown up a bit and decided that what I should really do the first time I buy ‘proper’ running shoes is to buy the right pair for me, letting my feet decide, and pay less attention to the brand. Unless, of course, it was Brooks, then it’s a firm ‘no’.

The Nikes, however, felt amazing. Really soft and light and they laced up beautifully. The Asics were okay but felt a bit clunkier, so I gave them the boot (apologies). The Sauconys, however, rivalled the Nikes in weight and comfort, but as they were slightly wider they actually felt more stable underfoot. So I bought them. As well as two triathlon singlets (one with one of those cool front-zips, as well as a ‘goodies’ back pocket), a sports armband that could actually (and finally) hold my Nokia N95 and a £10 pair of Nike dry fit socks. What? I had to have something Nike, just to please the Gods.

I got the whole lot for around £100 ($200), with a few discounts thrown in, and went away pretty pleased.

I spent a few more hours in Brighton basically stuffing my face (today was my off day, decided in advance because my wife’s spa pass came with a free lunch at their not inexpensive restaurant), and then went home, collecting my son along the way.

The shoes are Saucony Guide. Not Glide, and not Grid - Guide. No, I’ve never heard of them either, but they review well and the guy in the shop was very enthusiastic, as you’d expect. But none of that matters if they felt lousy on my feet.

Thankfully, they don’t. Actually, they feel incredible. I set off on my run just before 5pm and really it was like running on cotton wool. They were incredibly light and my feet could actually breathe in them. I knew my old Nikes were getting a bit long in the tooth but I had no idea how flat and hard the soles had become, and how much they cramped my feet. No wonder they were going numb all the time.

The Sauconys felt so good, in fact, that after a minute or so I glanced down at my Garmin and was shocked to see that I was running 6:30/mile! More amazing still, I kept that pace for another minute. And another. And another.

Pretty soon, I’d clocked a 6:39 mile. I couldn’t believe it. It’s gotta be the shoes!

I reached my turnaround and kept on blasting along. Mile two was a 7:03.

Mile three was a staggering 6:42.

My previous 5K best was 24:37. When I passed the 3.1 mile mark today, I glanced down at my watch and it said 21:05.

And I didn’t even feel like I was running hard.

By now I was getting more than a little suspicious. I was pretty sure that while the shoes were great and I was running maybe slightly faster than normal, I wasn’t even capable of running as fast as this. Not yet. Not now. Not after all that pizza I ate for lunch.

About halfway through mile four, I was pretty sure that my Garmin was giving me bad data. The seconds were moving at the right speed, and I had hit certain landmarks quite a few seconds faster than ever before, but there was no way I was just casually running under seven-minutes like this, not without feeling like I was going to fall apart at any moment.

The realisation of this hit me pretty hard, and I actually became pretty disillusioned. I decided to stop at the four-mile mark. When I analysed the data back home, I’d averaged 6:51 over those four miles. One day, maybe. Right now? Impossible.

I did some research and here is what I think happened. When you get new shoes, you need to move over the transmitter pod that feeds data (speed, etc) to your Garmin watch from your old shoe to the next. I clipped it on to my Sauconys and thought nothing of it. However, what I’ve now found is that it’s highly recommended that whenever you get new shoes you should recalibrate your transmitter with your watch to make sure it’s still tracking your miles correctly. Even something minor like the new position and angle of the pod can affect the reading the watch is giving, simply because it had become used to the way it was before (and had been for x weeks).

This is clearly what happened today.

What do I think I ran, overall? Probably a minute slower. It felt like a 7:51, which would still be a new PB. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the unit is working fine and I’m on my way to becoming the British take on Steve Prefontaine. But somehow I doubt it.

How do you recalibrate a Garmin? You need to take it to the track, run off a lap or two of 400m, and set it accordingly. My problem: there’s only one track in my hometown, it’s in a school, and they keep very lean public access hours. It’s actually open tomorrow from 9am-1pm, and I may have to ignore my body’s early cries for sleep (I’m at work writing this on my first of three night shifts) and go do some track. Otherwise, the data is going to be pretty useless to me.

Anyway, day 40 is in the bag. Moving along nicely.

The Nike socks, incidentally, were great. Maybe it was them?

###

Yesterday I watched Prefontaine for the first time. I really enjoyed it. It was a bit cheesy in parts, a bit Disney, but I thought overall it was well made and actually quite moving at times. I thought about it a bit over the day but not in any real depth.

Later that night, I had the most bizarre dream. I’d somehow, and for some reason, been drafted in to represent Great Britain in swimming in the Beijing Olympics. It was the semi-finals. I was due to race in the second heat. Up first was a Russian swimmer - who in the dream was the world champion - facing a 10-year old kid called Kevin.

In the dream, Kevin had also been drafted in at the last moment. But he was an immediate superstar. The crowds couldn’t get enough of him. He looked a bit like a young Ashton Kutcher, but tougher. And he was tough. This kid, who had a swim stroke that would be flattered with ‘messy’ as a description, somehow clawed and scratched and sheer-out gutsed his way to victory. The crowd, as you would imagine, went ballistic. Instantly - it was dreamworld, after all - the front page of every British newspaper bore just one word as their headline - KEVIN - underneath of which was his picture.

Moments passed and there I was bobbing up and down in the water, wondering how the hell I was going to follow that, let alone pull this off, as I haven’t swum a stroke in any kind of genuine capacity for years. My German competitor entered the arena, the crowd cheered, and thankfully I woke up.

It took me a full 10 seconds to realise that I didn’t still have to compete.

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