News & New Trends for New Year!

​Could an American Women Win the Boston Marathon? Seeing Shalane Flanagan win the New York City marathon was one of the biggest running highlights of 2017. After hearing the rumors that she was planning to retire after the NYC marathon, I’m super excited to hear she is planning to race the Boston Marathon. She will have a great group of American women with her. It looks as though the strength of American women in distance running for 2018 will be a huge improvement. With having such a great pack of American women racing the Boston Marathon with Shalane, even if she doesn’t win, we could have a good chance of just about any American women out of the pack being the winner! Since Shalane broke the 40-year mark in New York, it would be amazing for any one of the American woman to win because they would be the first American woman to win the Boston Marathon since 1985. Will 2018 be the rise for running women? We’ve seen a huge rise in women running in crews of all kinds, inclusive, competitive, and casual. Women are continuing to flood the running community, dominating road-racing, we also know that seeing women supporting other women leads to positive running results, and in 2017 we got a lot of women empowerment. It’s an amazing thing, to be getting more and more women in the running community.

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​​Now it’s all about the customizable shoes? Many say that customizable shoes will come to a rise in 2018. Almost every major brand has that as an option, but none have been successful with making a perfect shoe without sacrificing some of the performance quality. We’ve seen some good stuff from Brooks and Salomon and some stuff from Nike and New balance, we have still yet to see a brand that can make the perfect running shoe that is made for you. Is it a gimmick? Is it really a thing that can be possible, or is this just something for marketing purposes? Let’s see how this goes, and what comes of this in the future months to come. It would be amazing, to finally have the perfect shoes, if there is such thing.
New wave of wrist wear? Smartwatches and fitness trackers will become even more accurate and skilled, they are rising from imperfect features to all-inclusive digital coaches that you can wear on your runs, bike rides, or even in the pool. The Misfit Vapor and the Fitbit Ionic watches, which were a big deal in 2017, those show us what’s to come in 2018.  They both are water-resistant, they can store music, hold third party apps, measure your heart rate, and track many kinds of activities, from running to swimming etc. The Fitbit Ionic and Samsung gear sport have other abilities, like one touch payments, and the Gear Sport takes that extra leap forward and has guided workouts, suggests workouts during the day and an addition with Speedo’s new app for deeper metric on swimming. Not only that, but new smartwatch releases from Apple and Google are to come in the new year as well. That could be cool, having a watch that’s practically smarter than yourself. I prefer simple, it’s harder to figure out the smarter watches these days because of all the features built into it.
Is resting really the new racing? In 2018, there will be a wider range of runners finally understanding the importance of rest days. Runners will start to understand that proper recovery is a part of training. Rest days, are becoming the bell of the ball, and for great reason. You need rest days. Rest days are the only time your body can restore and replenish itself, and allow itself to adapt to all the hard work you’ve been putting into your body. For an example, Shalane Flanagan, noticed that a back injury in 2017 forced her to have a real long break from running, but when she had returned to running she felt revived and her workouts were among the fastest of her career, which as we saw resulted in her amazing victory for the NYC Marathon. So, give your body the rest it needs to revive itself, so you can be better than ever! Your body could surprise you! 

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