 Hello and welcome to episode 10 of the Lakeland 100 training series. This week it's all about trail shoes and what are the right shoes for you for the race that you are doing. So stick around for that. But first of course, as always, we need to look at last week's training. So we are ramping the miles up and this week we had to do 130 kilometers. So I thought I'd start the week with a big run. We did 41 kilometers and we did the beachy head marathon route. So we started at halfway round just for logistics and ran all the way around the beachy head marathon route. We just didn't go down to the start finish area which cut off that last kilometer. So that was an awesome start on Monday. So just to give you an idea of training pace for that kind of run. It's a hilly run. It's not necessarily technical, but it certainly got to elevation and my best time on the beachy head marathon race is 3 hours 37 minutes. Training pace running on Monday five and a half hours. So two hours slower than race pace. After Monday's 41 kilometers, we did 20 kilometers on Tuesday. Starting in the morning, if you watch this series you should know by now, Tuesday mornings is film my run 500 day. So we do 500 meters of climb with 12 percent set on the treadmill. Then in the evening I went out with the Worthing Harriers. My club we did a 10 mile run, a hilly run. So that's a whole hill day on Tuesday. And we added another 10k on Wednesday. I'd been invited to run the Bromley Midsummer Evening 10k. Now I couldn't race it as such because I had to interview people while I was filming and things. But I did go fairly hard. 44 minutes, 10k on Wednesday. On Thursday, I was back on Zwift on the treadmill doing the film my run 500 climb. If you want to go and watch any of my Zwift runs, I do stream them all live on the Zwift run channel and you can go and watch them back if you want to. That's over on the Zwift run channel. In the evening I was on the treadmill again. We were doing the Bag That Badge series on Zwift and that was 13 kilometers. So that made a total of around 17 kilometers on Thursday. By Friday I could start to take things a little bit easier in terms of mileage. So on Friday we did 10k on Zwift, nice and easy as part of the Zwift run festival. Mileage was coming along very nicely. Saturday we were back racing again. This time I was running for the Worthing Harriers with my club in the West Sussex Fun Run League in a place called Hassex we did seven and a half kilometers and I came in. In my fastest time ever on that course I've eaten my previous time by two minutes coming in in 31 minutes. To round the week off on Sunday I actually did some cross training but I did also do a very easy 10k on the seafront on Sunday evening. I wonder what a chalk restaurant is like. And that rounds off the week, 130 kilometers if you include the 1k swim. If you don't include that then I'm getting under the skin of all you people with OCD who like to round everything up. I actually did 129.6 kilometers of running. Look there's no need to get my shoes on and go back out there and do another 400 meters of running just to round it up to 130k. I know you guys always love it when I break down the week sessions to see how it looks against my 80-20 rule. So this week I've broken it down into three different scenarios. Time, distance and activities. So the most favorable one is activities. If we discount warm-ups and things like that I did 10 sessions this week. Two of those sessions were hard efforts. So 20%. 20% of my running this week was a hard effort as it should be with the 80-20 rule. If we look at heart rate zones. So a hard effort is in zones 4 and 5 of heart rate and you'll see here that I've done almost 14% of this week's running in zone 4 and 5. And if we look at it in terms of distance you can see again around about 13% of the distance that I've run was at a hard effort at a fast pace. The only thing I'd say is there are no interval sessions in there. So I think I must get some interval training in next week. When I first joined the running club around 10 years ago now I didn't know what trail shoes were. I didn't know they existed. Since then I've tried so many different manufacturers models of trail shoe. Now when it comes to running shoe manufacturers you know there are hundreds of them out there but there are one or two at the top of the tree in terms of particularly trail running and they are Hoca particularly well known for their high stack height very comfortable long distance running shoes. Innovate. Innovate make deep lugs for running on mud and they have a very ground feel a little less comfortable perhaps than Hoca's but very well loved trail shoe. You've also got Las Bortiva loved by the elites a lot of very high profile runners love Las Bortiva shoes and then you've got Salomon of course very well branded shoe again very loved by a lot of high profile athletes. And those are your main four trail running shoe manufacturers. But of course there's also Brooks, Asics, Adidas, New Balance, Sorkony 101 different companies making trail shoes and it's best to go into a running shop if it's your first pair of trail shoes and just try a load of pairs out see what fits see what feels comfortable you might find in trail running shoes that you're a half size bigger than in your normal running shoes it depends across manufacturers but sometimes I've found that if I get half a size bigger it's a little bit better especially when you're smashing downhills you need that little bit of extra room in the end of your toe so that your toe doesn't bash off the end and ruin your toenails. But when you're buying your trail shoes you want to think about why you're buying them what race are you buying them for or what specific kind of training are you buying them to do? Where are you going to be running? Will it be mostly on hard pack dry trails or are you going to be in mud a lot of the time? Are you going to be on slippery rock? Are you going to be clambering over boulders? And chalk? Are you going to be sliding down slippy grassy banks? And if it's all of those things perhaps you need to invest in more than one pair of trail shoes you also need to consider the distances that you'll be running that will make a big difference to the type of trail shoe you might want to buy because if you're running very long distances 50 to 100 miles you might feel that you need more cushioning and a shoe that is a little bit more durable whereas if you're simply running 10k, half marathon even up to a marathon a lighter, less durable shoe might do the trick. For example take a look at this breakdown of the kind of shoes that were used in the UTMB 100 mile race over the past few years. You'll see that whilst innovators are very well loved as a trail shoe they might not be used quite so much in long distance races primarily because they're kind of known for having this lower stack height which gives you a bit more of a ground feel and over 100 miles that may not be so comfortable. That said, Demian Hall uses Innovate and he's run the UTMB quite a few times and done perfectly well, thank you very much. When you're looking at the terrain that you're going to run on you need to think about the lugs on the soles of the shoes so if you're going to run on very dry terrain very flat terrain, easy terrain the lugs are not going to need to be so big they're not going to need to have that much traction because the dry floor, the flat ground is going to give you that traction anyway, you're not going to slip whereas if it's wet, if it's muddy if your feet are going to sink in a bit then you might want to get shoes like Innovate for example with really thick deep lugs so they can really claw, in fact Innovate has some shoes called mud claws they claw into the ground and grip the ground so you get some traction to pull off so if you're going to be running on muddy ground you want to look at a deeper lug on the sole of the shoe so what do you do if you're going to run a 100 mile race that has mud and slippy ground well that's when you have to make that choice between comfort and grip and you're not going to get a shoe which encompasses everything that you want look just a quick note on Gore-Tex do not bother with waterproof trail shoes or waterproof socks if your feet are going to get wet they will get wet and if your feet get wet wearing waterproof gear then that's going to cause you no end of problems your feet are best getting wet and then drying out or just staying wet in comfortable merino wool socks and good quality shoes many years ago I told my wife I didn't ever want to buy a pair of Hoka trail shoes so for my birthday my wife got me a pair of Hoka trail shoes and honestly I've not looked back I have been wearing Hoka for all those years for what seven, eight years now in the past I've worn Scots I've worn Outras I've worn Salomon I've never worn a pair of Innovates actually but I may well do for the Ben Nevis Ultra coming up in September which I found out over two attempts of doing it that I really do need those thick lugs to get down some of those steep slippy descents talking about Outras I bought the Outras because I wanted to feel what it was like to have that very wide toe box and see how my feet felt all splayed out so if you have wide feet or you find that a lot of trail shoes are too narrow for your feet try Outras because their toe box is hugely wide and very comfortable although they do do zero drop shoes that means there's no difference in height between the heel and the toe so what do I wear now well I generally wear these Hoka Evo speed goats but they are as you can see pretty worn they've lasted me very well over many long distance races they are very light for trail shoes and incredibly comfortable more comfortable because I also put these Enator insoles inside go and have a look at my Enator insol review up there suffice to say I will be upgrading to Hoka Speed Go 5s before the Lakeland 100 I need a long distance trail shoe that's going to be comfortable but it's going to have lugs on the bottom deep enough to satisfy the kind of terrain that we're going to get at Lakeland so those are going to be my new trail shoe purchases for road marathons I would use a night vapor fly next percent and for running on the treadmill I tend to use my New Balance 1080 version 11 and that is it for episode number 10 of the Lakeland 100 training series thanks for joining me if you've enjoyed the episode please do subscribe down below if you're not already and if you haven't seen the other episodes in the series then they are available by this link here take care we're episode 11 next week