running

The first time I read that running can turn your toenails black or even make them fall off, I knew I'd found the limit to my dedication to the sport. I'll run through achey joints, sore muscles and most blisters, but toenails are sacrosanct, a permanent part of my body. Fortunately, mine have survived my handful of marathons entirely intact and properly colored.

Some, however, are being preempting the problem.

In an earlier column, I suggested that shoe reviews are often not worth much, since everyone is so different. Well, that’s exactly the logic behind the Somnio shoe I’m about to give a positive review. Somnio is the brainchild of Sean Sullivan, a long-time gear designer who created a shoe with modular parts, so you (or rather, the trained guy at the shoe store) can dial in just the right arch support and cushioning for your stride.

While I love my fancy Garmin watch, most runners don’t need $400 worth of tech on their wrist. That’s why the Nike+ iPod system is so brilliant: cheap, stupid-simple and gives you the basic info—time, pace, distance—automatically uploaded to Nike’s training site. Which is why the utter lack of innovation since the system debuted more than two years ago has been disappointing.

Last month, we wrote about Nike's "revolutionary" new shoe, the LunarGlide+, which promised to be all things to all people: a stability shoe when you needed the extra support, and a cushion shoe when you don't. The difference is a sandwich of new kinds of high- and low-density lightweight LunarLite foam in place of the typical hard "post" that keeps your foot from rolling excessively inward.

Editor Mike Haney is training for the New York City Marathon with all the help from high-end running tech he can get. Read his previous posts here.

Did you know that several of the NASA research centers scattered around the country keep lists on their Web sites of the technologies they have available to license and sell to the public? Neither did I, but that's why I'm not launching businesses like David Belaga is. He's the CEO of Wellness Brands, which plucked a beverage NASA developed to keep astronauts hydrated and just started selling it as The Right Stuff, a concentrate for elite athletes that want to separate their electrolyte intake from their carb intake (carbs in sports drinks typically being some form of sugar).

I consider myself more of an elite non-athlete, but on a few recent runs, I poured some Right Stuff vials into bottles of water to see if it helped keep my whistle wet.

Editor Mike Haney is training for the New York City Marathon with all the help from high-end running tech he can get. Read his previous posts here.

Despite my geeky leanings, I've typically run with tech no more complex than an Ironman watch. But in the spirit of the title of this column, I've recently been testing a number of sports watches, from Suunto, Polar, and Garmin, to see if I could gain anything from monitoring my effort (or lack thereof). So far, the one device I find myself frantically searching the house for before I head out is the new Garmin Forerunner 405CX. And not for what it puts on my wrist, sleek as it is, but for what it puts on my monitor later.

Editor Mike Haney is training for the New York City Marathon with all the help from high-end running tech he can get. Read his previous posts here

I've prepared for my past four marathons with roughly the same plan: Run as little as possible. Now I'm old and out of shape, so to stand a chance at beating my last NYC Marathon time (3:27:45), I need a training scheme that seriously puts me to work. But I don't want to just mindlessly pound out miles -- if I'm donning the Dri-Fit, I better know why.

Thanks to technology, your heart rate, sweat rate, calories burned, stride length, and whether you're wearing boxers or briefs can all be calculated in real time, wirelessly transmitted to a laptop, and posted to Twitter before you return home from your weekend jog. Engineers in Germany are hoping to add blood lactate levels to the abundance of fitness data using a miniature ear clip containing an electrochemical sensor.

Running shoes for real runners are regularly categorized into two types: stability shoes, for those who over-pronate, and cushioning shoes, for those who don't. Nike's LunarGlide+, available July 1 for $100, claims a novel mid-sole architecture described as "Dynamic Support," which eliminates the need to choose between the two types. But more impressive than that assertion is the simplicity of the design by which Nike hopes to revolutionize the industry.