Taking care of my feet.

I will be the first to admit that I do not pay all that much special attention to details. Well, some. I mean I love stats about marathon splits or how many letters of the alphabet I have hit with the names of marathons (21 so far) or how many times I can find the number "52" in my race times. But when it comes to paying attention to certain things about my body, I am much more lax.

I don't wear a heart rate monitor. I have no idea what 90% of my VO2 Max is in order to properly run and until most recently I paid very little attention to what goes on my feet.

Now I am not talking about shoes. I do pay attention to that. Rather I am talking about what goes on the feet first. Yep, socks! You see, after running both the Ogden Marathon and Deseret News Marathon in the past two months, I was left with a couple of blisters in places I had never had blisters before. I know the downhill sections of these courses were to blame but I wanted to see how I could prevent it. I had a feeling the shoes weren't the problem. Rather, I needed to look more carefully at socks.

Being a heavy sweater, it is no surprise my feet get extra slick in races. I therefore knew I needed something with good wicking material. I had been using some old socks that I had been wearing for quite sometime. I decided to go back to a pair I had worn on a number of occasions but had more or less forgotten about recently. And when I say "forgotten about", I mean "lost in my move and had been too lazy to buy new ones since".

The socks I am talking about are Feetures.



I had worn these socks before and loved them and am not sure why I did not just stock up on them. Well, I won't forget to do so again. Especially after wearing them in my most recent PR in the Provo Trail Run Half Marathon that had massive portions of downhill. When I took my shoes off, my feet did not have a single new blister. Can't beat that!

The Feetures brand has three types of socks. And it was the "Light" brand that I wore to a set a new PR. I will undoubtedly be testing out the other brands on runs in the near future. In the meantime, I highly suggest you pamper your feet and buy a pair or two. You won't regret it!


On a side note, today I went for a nice easy 6.5 mile run which put me at 1778 miles run for the year. Nothing spectacular at all, really. But with 140 days left in the year, that total is higher than all the miles I ran during the entirety of 2006, when I did Fiddy2. I told you I like stats!