"I've Never Seen That"

Sunday, I coerced Andy into stopping by the Running Room on our way to run some errands. I was hoping to scope out the new Nike Vomero +4 shoes as my shoes have been actually hurting my feet lately. Out of sheer curiosity, I asked the guy helping me if perhaps I might not be a neutral shoe like I was previously assessed. He had me take a few walks around the store and watched me bend at the knees. His face looked puzzled. He signaled to another coworker, "Come watch this. Tell me what you think." So I walked around the store again, this time 2 employees watching my gait. "Well, I haven't seen that before." "Me neither." I still have no clue what they are talking about. They decided that maybe I needed a low stability shoe. While looking for a low stability shoe, they signaled to a third, more experienced employee to help out with the analysis. I walked around the store, yet again. As I was turning back towards him, his head was turned to the side. "That's different. I haven't seen that before." He, then, said that I was somewhere between a neutral and a low stability shoe and threw a bunch of shoes at me to run around the store in. He watched me run in each pair of shoes and continued to hear, "That is definetly different." and then, "Those shoes aren't working." Meanwhile, I'm still clueless as to what is so strange about me. I eventually asked if it was something I could just fix instead of trying to find a shoe to fit my quirkiness. He said, no, probably not. He told me that I am evidently on the early stages of pronation. I'm not entirely sure what that means because I didn't know pronation could develop, I thought you either had it or you didn't. He didn't really specify whether I overpronate or underpronate either. Then, he said something like, "You pronate slightly and then turn back in at the last second of your pushoff." So I was thorougly confused. Anyways, they were attempting to correct this problem without overcorrecting the problem. He ended up telling me that out of all of their shoes, the Brooks Infiniti was the only shoe that would somewhat work for me. It just so happened that this shoe was also on clearance and not returnable. So, I put it on hold because I wasn't sure I wanted to purchase a $100 shoe without being able to return it, especially if it didn't even seem like a "perfect fit".

Now, I am going to have to visit another running store later to determine whether someone else sees this quirkiness that those 3 people saw.

I also went for a run on Sunday afternoon with Duke. It was probably my worst run with Duke ever. I had to pull him 3/4 of the way through our 4 mile run. He has run this route before with little pulling. I actually had to pull him up like 5 hills as well. And he isn't a light dog by any means. I actually enjoy hills these days, but pulling a heavy dog up the hill just made it so unenjoyable.