Tag Archives: Patagonia

Old Faithful: Gear I Love

Some of my favorite running gear--Brooks shorts, capri tights, and Equilibrium shirt.

Some of my favorite running gear--Brooks shorts, capri tights, and Equilibrium shirt.

You can pick almost any category of life and chances are anyone you ask will have their favorite something in that category. Favorite food, color, car, holiday, the list goes on. As a runner and an athlete I have favorite gear and I’m sure you do too. However, I don’t think you just stumble upon the best gear for your needs, I think you acquire it through a series of trial and error with all different kinds of gear.

I’ve written before about things that I have had the chance to try out like sports bras and shorts and I have written about the importance of layers that I discovered during winter running. Any time I have the chance to share an experience that helps or improves my running or that simply makes me happy (and I’m easily pleased!) I will be doing so on this site. And if I come across things that don’t fit so well with my work-outs or training I’ll share that too. What works for me may not work for you but at least if you’re researching you’ll have one more source to confer.

I will provide links and resources to the things I love and when you see that link it is because I have used the product or like the brand (and in some cases have a relationship with them) and if you choose to check it out, that’s awesome.

I like to consider my tried and true gear as my “old faithful” gear. Even though I am perfectly willing to try new things–new socks, new shirts, Cliff Shot Bloks instead of Gu–it’s nice to know what will always work. So, with no further ado (and in alphabetical order to be fair), here is some gear that has done me right and that I will continue to buy and use whenever I have the chance: Continue reading

The Law of Layers

Cold Weather SceneI am a fairly patient and tolerable person; it takes a lot to get me riled up and I tend to like most things. There are only a couple things I truly hate: mosquitoes and being cold. I would take being hot over being cold any day. When I’m cold I feel like I can’t function, I usually scrunch my shoulders up to my ears which ends up hurting, and I’m liable to lose my usually positive spirit if I’m freezing. For these reasons, I avoided cold weather running for years.

This winter, however, I decided to buck up and power through the cold. It helped that I had set my running goals so I was already motivated. I also started reading a lot about how to properly layer and followed the blogs and tweets of runners out there in much colder climates than what we experience in Maryland. Thanks to some fabulous Christmas gifts and a mini-shopping spree of my own, I built up enough running gear that I could very easily layer up for even the coldest temps. Though the Maryland winter so far has been relatively mild I pushed myself through 30 and then 20-degrees, down into the teens, and my coldest run was in 9-degree weather. Continue reading