New Toys and getting ready

This is a mixture of the week that was with product review and some thoughts about the race. As you may have guessed, the week had been busier than I thought and blogging was somewhere down the list, just after Rest and Recovery.
But I made it, and it surely won't repeat until post race. I had quite a bit on my plate with work being surprisingly busy for winter months, plus a practical to do at uni and house chores to be done. August started with an easy week at training, but I didn't find it easy allright. After Monday's swim PB and steady run I was happy for both my PB and my recovered leg. Tuesday was a normal gym and bike day with plenty of time to recover, Wed swim was not easy at all, coach has decided to start trialling some core conditioning excercises in the middle of hard swim sets; it was fun and tiring, so all good in that department.
Which brings us to Friday. As I said, we had a coversation with coach and we will vary the traditional speed sets. They will be about the same lengh in time (30 to 45min), but the rest intervals will be active in the form of some killer excercises (thrust squats, lunges, power ab crunches, and more). Friday was the test set and I can say I feel it today.
Saturday is the end of the hard week, there was no bike ride on the brick session and the swim was steady but not hard. Tomorrow we start straight on another couple of hard weeks. This is the time were the weight loss kicks in. I'm in big need of some weight loss. Not that I am over it, but it comes handy for the race. I am always pretty steady on 72kg and I should have a more integral approach to nutrition, matter is that I never got around to include it. So, in the next couple of weeks, no matter how much I eat, I still end up a bit more ripped than before, and that's something I am looking forward.
I also got my new toys. A friend sent an email with very cheap prices for shoes on an online store, I got in there and left 200 dollars poorer and 2 pair of trainers happier.

The first one to review is the Adidas Response Stability shoes. As the name indicates, the shoes are all about having a stable foot stroke. They offer support on the heel, arch and forefoot and great cushioning. They look like quite heavy tractors, suprisingly, though, they are not. They are buky, but they don't weight a lot. On the presentation side, the colours are the typical dull combination of reds, silvery greys and whites, I'd rate them very conservative on that department. I was afraid the first runs would be hard on the lateral musles of te lower leg and I was right. I overpronate and tend to wear shoes on the inside quite fast, so this should only take a couple of more runs. The soles are nothing fancy and you can wear them outside the tarmac, but I wouldn't go go use them off road as a default, they are not as agile. I still haven't found a brand of shoes that can grip my feet as Adidas so my final say is 4/5 due to the poor looks and boring sole.
Tomorrow is race day, so I'll be late and tired, hopefully, though, I'll bring a happy report
Happy training everyone!