;)
It's in the shoes
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 1:22PM My favorite style weighs seven grams. I have nine pairs of those. I keep them in baggies in the closet with silica gel packets and athlete’s foot powder. Because you just can’t find them anymore. I got most of them on eBay from different resellers. They’re worth a chunk of change, but they shave off enough mass to hold off the fatigue at the end of a long race.
Sure. I noticed a huge difference when I switched from the nine gram to the eight gram shoes and stopped wearing socks. They get an unholy smell after a couple of runs but they’re worth it for that forty-two seconds I save.
They wear microfiber shirts, long-sleeved and white. Mesh sun caps. Expensive wrap-around sunglasses. Complicated wrist-watches or smart phones on a bicep band with one ear hook. They stand in arrogant postures holding silver, bullet-shaped water bottles with the logos of running brands. They suck the last drop of goo from little foil energy packets.
The race winner walks by. He’s a college kid. Along the race route people called and cheered him by name. He halved their times in broken-in, stock, Nikes and a tank top. He’s eating a banana and drinking the free water provided by the race organizers. He waves at them. They smile and call his name, eager to ask him questions. He shrugs, slowing his pace only for a moment. He drops the banana peel into the trash can and jogs to his car.
Reader Comments (2)
Is this a real story or a made-up story? Either way I like it a lot. A lot a lot. (Intelligent commentary, I know.)
It is a real situation I observed, with an only-slightly-exaggerated reproduction of a snippet of shoe dialogue I heard. A lot. ;-) xo