I wrote yesterday about Vibrams and why I’m not going to apply for my portion of the class-action suit against them (and why you shouldn’t either, for that matter). But I got so angry and sidetracked thinking about how dumb the whole situation is that I didn’t have the time left over to talk about why the VFFs are awesome. Nope, not just awesome, why the VFFs are my favorite shoe that isn’t a shoe.
Category: Running
I run a lot, and sometimes I write about it. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Things don’t always have to mean something!
The ToeBags (or, Why Vibram FiveFingers Aren’t Evil) (or, There Is No Miracle Pill)
If you’re anything of a running nerd like me, you’re probably aware that Vibram has received some dubious press of late, vis-a-vis a class-action lawsuit that went against them a few weeks back. They are one purveyor — probably the biggest — of those barefoot-style shoes, the ones that look like fancy socks. (My wife and I call them the Toe-Bags.) They’re cashing in, hard, on the minimalist trend that’s coursing through the running community like an electric shock through Frankenstein’s monster.
Apparently Vibram made some claims about things their non-shoes can do without proper science to back it up. And that’s not cool. Sorry, if you’re selling a thing, it’s not okay to tell me that your thing can turn me into the ubermensch, make me able to leap tall buildings and sharknado like that, when it does none of those things. If you’re doing that, as a company, shame on you.
However.
Vibram’s guilt in this goes only so far. Read More »
Running is Magic
Running is nothing if not a constant dialogue with yourself about the things you never thought you’d do.
I never thought I’d take up running.
Then I never thought I’d enjoy running.
I never thought I’d run in a race. (Pay money to run? Run with other people? Do I look like a fool?)
Then I never thought I’d run multiple races in a year.
I never thought I’d run more than three or four miles at a stretch.
Then I never thought I’d run more than six. Or eight. Or ten. Or thirteen.
Oh, that’s half of a marathon. I never thought I’d run a half marathon.
I never thought I could appreciate any activity completed outdoors in the summer in the deep south.
Or in the winter for that matter.
I never thought I’d look forward to getting up while most of the world is asleep to “exercise”.
I never thought I’d ever be grumpy about not going for a run.
I never thought I’d ever have anything to say about running that was worth writing down. (Okay, that’s probably still debatable.)
I could go on, but that’s probably enough for the moment. Anyway, I say all that to say this. Running is magic.
I don’t say that lightly. Writing is magical. My son is magical. My wife is magical. (No, seriously. She once cast a spell on me and it WORKED. She also convinced me that getting married was a good idea, so clearly she has magical powers of persuasion.) But that’s about where the magic ends in my life. Just for the record, I set the bar pretty high when it comes to declaring things magical. A decent magician can pull a rabbit out of a hat or tell you what card he forced you to pick. Real magic is when a piece of lead turns into a piece of gold right before your unblinking eyes. Real magic is when something that WASN’T suddenly IS. Real magic is when the work and the time you put into something gets magnified and transmogrified and turned into rainbows and kittens and sunshine and all the good things.
Writing? Magical. I feel smarter every day that I write, and given the esteem that I hold my intelligence in (again, I will reference my wife), that’s a pretty big deal. But in addition to getting my story down in literal, tangible words that another human could read, consider, and then (hopefully) enjoy, it’s filling me with a sense of purpose and accomplishment and a sort of general sense of being a little bit awesome. My son? Magical. I put in a fun weekend in Florida and a few sleepless nights and I’m rewarded with a TINY FARGOING HUMAN that’s basically me on a thirty-year delay. Incredible. My wife? Magical. I know of no other person on earth who would put up with and call me on the stupid things that I do and still allow me to have happy fun times with her. (She might kill me tonight for writing that. That would be less magical.)
Running, to return to the point, requires a bit more explanation. I’ve sunk a metric sharknadoload of time (not to be confused with the imperial sharknadoload) into running, and what have I got to show? I lost some weight. I “feel” healthier. The endorphins that follow an individual run are nice. But that seems like a balanced equation; there’s no magic there.
No, the magic of running is not like the magic of a rainbow suddenly appearing. It’s more like the magic of a sculpture emerging from a raw hunk of marble under the practiced hands of Michaelangelo. (He made sculptures, right? I don’t know Art.) You work at it, and you work at it, and you chip away day after day after day, knowing that there’s something good under those layers of stone and sweat and tears and exhaustion, and then one day it just appears. Like Batman out of the dark. He was there all along, saving your asgard, looking out for you, protecting your city and your whole way of life, but he only just now revealed himself to you because you only just now stopped to look.
Running gives you patience. Not right away. When you first dip your toes in the shallow end of the pool, you barely have the patience to slog it out for twenty minutes. But you can’t embark on a thirteen mile run, or a twenty-six mile run, or a fifty mile run without the patience not to get bored, not to get distracted, not to quit halfway through because you just can’t stand the tedium for another minute. Running teaches you to accept the tedium of the long miles and, eventually, to appreciate it.
Running gives you resilience. It hurts. It’s exhausting. Especially at first. But the more you do it, the less it hurts, the less it exhausts you, and finally you realize that running wasn’t the problem, the old you was the problem. The more you learn to get up off the mat when running knocks you down (and running WILL knock you down), the easier it gets to keep standing up for another helping.
Running gives you confidence. You start small. If I can run for a minute, maybe I can run for two. If I can run for two, maybe I can run for three. If I can run for a half-mile, maaaaybe I can run an entire mile. And then you get there. Sooner than you think. And what was once impossible becomes routine, and you start getting crazy with confidence. If I can run fivemiles, maybe I can run ten. If I can run a half-marathon, maybe I can write a fargoing book.
Sidenote: it’s foolish and stupid that half-marathons are called half-marathons. You have a 5k, then a 10k, and those sound awesome. Then there’s a half-marathon, which sounds like, “well, that’s nice I suppose, but why not a whole marathon?” To which runners who have just accomplished their first run at that distance might, rightly so, kick you in the sack. And yeah, I know, some people call them Pikermis, and that’s nice and all, but nobody knows how to pronounce Pikermi and it sounds a little ridiculous besides. Call it a Salvador or something, or surely there is some other Greek city with a nice name we could appropriate.
Finally, Running gives you a sense of community. I don’t know if I could name a social situation I’ve been in where the collective vibe was more uplifting than at any race I’ve attended. Runners support one another, because we’re not running against one another, we’re running with one another. And if you’ve never raced, then at the very least you know the deep-seated connection you have with every other runner you pass on the road. Whether you wave or not, whether they wave or not, you see each other, and you know that they know, and they know that you know, and both of you are going through it together. Through what? Through it all.
Why am I still writing this? I’m going for a run. (Okay, fine, I’m going for a run in the morning. I just… god. Why you gotta ruin it?)
(EDIT: My wife would like for me to point out that there is in fact nothing magical about blisters.)
Run in the Rain, or don’t, it’s only the Awesomest Thing Ever
Runners are strange birds. Not only do we enjoy an activity which most people in the world really, really hate and, in fact, avoid at every opportunity, but we find some of the most painful and most bizarre aspects of the activity to latch onto.
For example: yesterday’s run. Nothing special about the run itself, except for the fact that it was raining.
I love running in the rain. I love it, love it, love it. I don’t know why. I shouldn’t. I stink even worse after a rain run, my shoes have to be retired for a couple days until they dry out, there’s mud, it’s cold… It’s dumb as haberdashery that I love it so much, but I can’t help it. I love it like a fat kid loves cake. I love it like my dog loves to run under my feet when I walk down the stairs in the morning. I love it like my son loves the goldfinger Tigger movie, and that’s a lot, probably an unhealthy amount.
Here are just a few reasons why running in the rain is awesome.
1. Especially in the spring and summer, it feels brilliant. The weather’s getting warmer here in Atlanta, and before we know it, it’ll be overnight lows of 70 or better for months at a time. That sucks. Running in the rain is like when you were a kid and hooked up the hose to a sprinkler — or, if you didn’t have a sprinkler, you just poked a bunch of holes in the hose — and ran through that thing for hours and hours and hours. It feels like happiness. It feels like bottled joy being poured over your head.
2. It makes you feel bad-Asgard. Know what non-bad-Asgards do? They don’t run. Know what non-bad-Asgard runners do? They run when it’s convenient, when it works for them, when it’s easy. Bad-Asgard runners run when they fargoing want to run, when they need to run, when they have to run. Long run day and it’s 90 degrees out? You’re running. Speedwork day and you have a brick of fettucine alfredo in your stomach from the overindulgence of a dinner you ate last night because you totally deserved it? You’re running. The typhoon strikes? El Nino is upon us? Atlanta is buried under three inches of snow (horror of horrors!)? You’re running. Something about running in the worst of conditions brings out the inner bad-Asgard in all of us. Well, all of us runners. Well, maybe just me.
3. Sense of Accomplishment. You’ve heard runners say that “every run is a good run.” Well, you have if you frequent running sites. If not, now you’re hearing it. But some runs are better than others. The tough runs make you feel like you did when you first started running, like when you first started breaking down those barriers that you didn’t think you could break. Running in the rain is awesome because it’s something that even a lot of runners just won’t do. But not you. It was nasty and gross out there and you ran anyway. High-five.
4. It’s Primal. Primitive man was probably a distance-runner because he had to be to survive. You think primitive man, running to survive, took the day off because it was raining? Fargo no, he didn’t. He laced up (footed up?) and threw down because if he didn’t, he’d starve. Or the lions would eat him. Or something.
5. You connect with nature. On any run, you get to breathe deeply of the great bounty of our planet’s slightly toxic atmosphere. Feel that burning in your lungs? That’s nature, son. That burning in your legs? PAIN IS WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY. That burning in your eyes? That’s god peeing on you to cool your overheated loins. Or it’s the acid rain. Seriously, wear a hat, that stuff burns.
6. The looks you get. Know that look you get when you see a monkey waddle past, juggling kitchen knives while balancing on a bowling ball? That look that says, “what the haberdashery did I just see? It was crazy and probably ill-advised.” That look on your face is hilarious, and I love it, love it, love it when you make it at me as you drive past in your warm-comfy SUV and I’m plodding through puddles. Please make it again so that I can keep laughing for another mile. (Whether I’m laughing at you or myself depends on how far I’ve run.)
7. Steam. Something about the moisture in the air and the heat of your body on and after a run creates a witchcraft of chemistry, and if you look closely, you can actually see the rain evaporating off your body in wisps of pale smoke. That’s right. You just worked out so hard you ALMOST BURST INTO FLAMES.
8. Just kidding, running in the rain sucks. Seriously, why would you want to do that? Just stay inside where it’s warm. You can get your miles in when it dries out. Let those other lunatics get soaked. They look almost happy out there – they must be crazy.
Good Day / Bad Day
What the sharknado just happened?
I was sitting here, polishing off the last of my lunchtime Diet Coke, writing the last three hundred words of my session for today, when all of a sudden I run, full on, into a wall. The throttle was wide open on my Formula One racecar and some inconsiderate dude has built a cinder-block wall in the middle of the track. I was soaring through the sky looking for my next mouse to devour and some entity has clipped my wings. I’m in the cafeteria pounding down some spaghetti and mashed potatoes and the school bully has slammed my face down into my tray.
This is a hard stop. A dead-end stop. A flat-out, no-way-around-it, you-are-fargoed stop. One of my characters has just realized (much to my surprise) that she does not want to be there; nay, that she CANNOT stay there. That it is not only a dereliction of duty for her to be there, but that it’s humiliating for her to do so. She not only CAN’T stay in the story as I’m imagining it, she simply WON’T.
My Id-Writer is chewing on the walls because he saw this coming: he feels as she feels, and he knows that this is a decision that I have to let her make. No, deeper than that, he knows that it’s not a decision at all, it’s already done. SHE’S GONE. She’s leaving the hero and his sham of a quest in the rearview and heading for greener pastures. IT’S WHAT SHE NEEDS TO DO, AND IT’S WHAT SHE WILL DO. It can’t be stopped. There’s no way around the grand canyon which has just opened up at my feet. I’ve got to rethink a lot of things.
I’ve hit little snags with the story along the way — little surprises, little deviations from the master plan — but this is off the map. I don’t know how the story continues if one of the two main characters leaves the other in the lurch right now. But it will have to somehow, because I can’t go back and rewrite the things that led up to this moment. Not now. THAT’S WHAT EDITING IS FOR, snarls my Id-Writer, PRESS ON THROUGH THE DARKNESS AND SEEK OUT THE LIGHT. He who turns back is lost.
Tomorrow’s writing session will be an interesting one. I don’t know how I’m going to get twelve hundred words in — or even nine hundred, for that matter — with this goldfinger MOUNTAIN thrown down across my path. I really don’t think I can, and that’s deeply upsetting to me, as I’ve not yet failed to make my writing goal in almost six weeks (!) of writing. Thank goodness the weekend is on the horizon; maybe a few days to ponder will help me to unstick this problem a little bit.
So that’s the bad day.
The good news is, my foot is feeling awesome. For the first few days after the podiatrist it felt rock-solid, then the immediate numbness of the cortisone began to wear off and I had a bit of soreness gnawing at the edges. Today, however, is a new day. I had a nice three-mile run this morning (with the dumb dog in tow) during which I felt no tweaks or twinges, and continuing through the day, the only weirdness I feel in the foot is right after I ice it, and that’s gone within fifteen minutes. So perhaps, perhaps, a return to normalcy is within sight on that front. Goodness knows I could use a nice two-hour run to work on unsticking my story.
Accidentally Inspired 