Jogging Stroller Recommendations Needed
Now, this isn’t a request for myself. I’ll stick with my BOB Revolution, thankyouverymuch… However, the son and daughter-in-law of my Mum’s friend (got that?) are having a baby soon and will need to get a jogger. They both run halfs and fulls and, like most of us with kids, would rather cart the baby along in a heavy contraption rather than give up running! I know that joggers are a personal preference, but I’d love to help them out and pass along some good advice.
Like I mentioned above, I have the BOB Revolution. Here are a few reasons I love it:
- Swivel or locked wheel. I keep it on swivel 99% of the time. Really, I’m just horrible at turning with it when it’s locked. Colin’s noticed that it starts to vibrate on swivel if he’s going too fast, but I’ve never had that problem!
- Fits in our trunk without taking the wheels off. That sounds funny, but it’s true! There’s nothing worse than buying something and finding out that you’ve made more work for yourself, especially with an infant.
- Car seat adapter. It makes it a little top heavy with the infant seat – I didn’t start running until after Spud was out it – so I can imagine that you’d need to have pretty good focus not to tip it over if you were rounding a corner too fast.
- Great on trails.
- Awesome rain cover. I don’t think Spud’s ever gotten wet through it. Doesn’t work with the infant seat though.
- Small basket that isn’t easily accessible if child is in seat. We used to have to put the diaper bag into the basket before putting Spud in the seat or it wouldn’t go in.
- Accessories are expensive, but I think this is true of all brands. Of all the ones we bought the most essential (for us) were the rain cover and the “console”, which is a cup holder.
- Not cheap. We bought ours on Craigslist, but still paid through the nose for it. This was on top of the Graco system that we’d already bought and decided wasn’t best for our lifestyle. Parenting “life lesson” there!
- BOB (fixed wheel).
- Baby Jogger.
- Chariot.
- Mountain Buggy.
- Phil & Ted’s.
- Valco.
- Zooper.
Post your recommendations, opinions (good and bad please), and links to reviews if you’ve done one in the comments section.
And, if you’d be so kind, mention this in a post and send people my way to comment! Thanks!
The Week (or so) in Review
The first, best and most exciting news is that I now have real, legitimate followers. Not to discount all of my friends and family who have told me they are checking this out though. I truly appreciate everyone’s support, regardless of the method, but it’s a huge ego boost to see those little icons in the sidebar. It’s nice to know the running community is so friendly and welcoming!
The other major event of the last week is that I started bootcamp. A friend and I were “encouraged” by another friend (you know who you are!) to join her on Monday nights at a local park for a weekly pseudo-Mum’s Night Out. Little did I know that it is really a mild form of torture. I’m not sure why I expected to be eased into the class, but that’s not the way it went. I will admit that it was a good workout. However, it massively kicked my butt. I could barely walk that night and it just went downhill from there. My husband, C, thought this was extremely funny and also derived great pleasure from poking me when I wasn’t paying attention. He commented that he figured if he pushed me off of the bed I’d just roll around on the floor like a beetle on its’ back. I would have thought this was mildly humorous if it hadn’t hurt to laugh. Needless to say I missed my run on Tuesday.
I think I’ll insert a little bit of a pity party here: My Wednesday (14th) stunk. I still couldn’t move my legs and I had my first hill training session to contend with. There was no way I could get out of it. Thankfully it was only 3 x 400m repeats and C took our son, M’s, buggy for 2 of those. The only thing I took away from that run (because, let’s face it, it was kind of a garbage run for me) was that the pain in my legs receded. That was a nice surprise and a learning experience for later days.
The best day of the week had to be Thursday. Just for variety I decided it would be okay to throw a giant (for me) hill into the tempo run mix. Even with this obstacle, which I will admit I walked part of, I ran 5km in 31.20. Bootcamp must be doing something good for my legs and core! It’s (I think) the fastest I’ve ever run that distance so I was pretty darned proud of myself. I was also happy that I finished my run before Pearl Jam finished their Backspacer album.*
Sunday saw me, C and M go out for a 10km long run. We do 10 and 1s – something else to come back to – and discovered that I should never push the buggy for the first half of a run. I’m slow for the first 20-30 minutes once I start and C expressed slightly veiled hatred for pushing for the end of the run. I guess we now know how our other long runs are going to go. We followed our run up with an 8km walk since it was a lovely, warm and sunny day.
The rest of the week has gone by fairly quickly. Bootcamp on Monday didn’t cripple me quite as much (notice I said “as much” – it still hurt). I made C force me to run on Tuesday, but he was nice enough to take buggy duty for the whole 4km. Unfortunately I still struggled to keep tempo pace. The bonus was that I didn’t wimp out and skip a scheduled run. Wednesday we were back to hills. I walked up the top half of the hill both times I had M, but, seeing as 33lb child + 25lb BOB = 58lbs to shove uphill, I won’t feel guilty for that. I ran through the ones I did without him so that’s good enough for me. I can’t even feel bad about taking the shortcut home.
Today is a day off, and then back to running.
See you next week!
*At another time I might get into my love of running to 90s alternative rock – a total throwback to when I was in high school.
Love My Runners 