Proper basketball shoes - they make a difference

I've been on a bit of a fitness kick recently, and have been running 9-10km almost every day. Well, not the days when I'm hungover, as on those days it's all I can do to walk from the couch to the kitchen and back again. Thankfully hangover days have been pretty limited since Shotty and Cookie left :)

In addition to all the running, I've been playing heaps of basketball - usually 3 hours on Wednesday, then another 3 hours on both Saturday and Sunday. Unfortunately, with all that exercise and the crap condition of some of the surfaces that I've been running/playing on, my extremely comfortable pair of New Balance shoes has fallen apart on me. After only a month of wear and tear, most of the sole came off the right shoe on Wednesday night.

I was extremely happy with those shoes even though they didn't last very long, so on Friday night I went over to the Raffles City shopping centre at People's Square in Puxi to get some new ones. I bought exactly the same pair as my last ones, but figured with all the basketball I'm playing, I'd better buy a more suitable pair of shoes to play in. I went into the flagship Nike store on the ground floor, and had a quick look around. They have a 'build-your-own' section there where you can design your own pair of shoes, which is pretty cool but pretty pricey too. My eye was caught by a pair of vintage Michael Jordan's, but those were more than $AUS400 (!), so I gave them a miss. I finally settled on a decent pair of Dirk Nowitzkis (he plays for the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA but I just bought them because I liked the look of them) for a little over $AUS100.

I took them out for a session on both Saturday and Sunday, and they held up very well! They're much more supportive around the ankle area for the quick turns that are made on a court, and are definitely a better fit for basketball than the running shoes were. Here's hoping that my New Balance's will last longer this time since I'll only be using them for running.