It's in the shoes

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.

100 Push Ups

Well, you know, Maria thinks I’m crazy. And maybe I am. But my brother and Partner are joining in, in which case we’d all have to be crazy. 

A friend suggested this website over on Facebook: 

One Hundred Push Ups

It’s a training site that helps you build up to being able to do 100 push ups.  The regimen is spread out over six weeks, but users are encouraged to go at their own pace, and repeat each workout week until they are comfortable.  I’m going to do it. 

The first step is a push up test to help determine where to begin in the training program. Do as many push ups as I can without hurting myself. That’s easier said than done. I discovered that I can’t do a single regular push up. I can do 10 knee push ups though, so my plan is to do modified push ups for a while and hope that I get strong enough to switch over to regular push ups at some point.  

I also hurt myself. My arms were really sore after I did my ten push ups. Then that night, I worked a ring toss booth at the elementary school family fun night. I bent down and picked up those little rings at least five million times. I felt like I had done one thousand lunges and squats the next day. I still ache when I walk up stairs. 

Needless to say, I gave myself a few days to recover before I started the week one push up workout. My brother, bless his overachieving heart, did enough push ups in his test that he’s supposed to start with week three of the workout schedule. I’m sure he’s already halfway to his 100 push up goal by now. Just for fun he’s also doing the 200 sit ups and 200 squats workouts. Like I said, OVERACHIEVER. Gotta love him. He’s sending me encouraging messages like this one:  “every journey has a beginning, however it may be measured. It is once the distance traveled is tallied and weighed against what is gained where the true worth is found.” I’d throw things at him if he weren’t a thousand miles away. 

In other news, it’s been THREE WEEKS since I’ve been running and I’m feeling a little crazy about it. I have an itching to get running, and do the push ups, and maybe after a few weeks add in the sit up workout. You know, rotate through all three. Yeah, my brother and I might share a gene or two. Don’t throw things at me, grasshopper. 

Bounce Control, a runner's journey through athletic lingerie

I went shopping for a new running bra today.  In the first store, the selection of sports bras was really limited.  They were mostly labeled “low impact.”  A few were labelled “cross training,” which turns out to mean stuff like lifting weights and doing yoga, though it took me a little while to catch on to the system.  Not really what I was looking for. 

The second store had a huge selection, multiple brands, colors, low, medium, high, and super high impact ratings.  “Super high impact” strikes me as an odd phrase for a bra.  Like someone is going to be smacking me in the chest or something.  Also odd is “bounce control,” though that one seems so much more accurate than the “impact” things.  

The best though (and you can be certain that I’m using the term “best” with drippy sarcasm), was the “high impact push-up bra.”  I know that when I’m sweaty, and bright red, and sometimes a bit queasy during a run that I want to be sure I have lovely cleavage.  But no bounce.

Update on Tuesday, September 28, 2010 at 9:31AM by Eglentyne

There are apparently only four acceptable colors for sports bras too.  White, some shade of pink, black, or royal blue so intense that it might damage your retinas (I think that’s a new choice).  I would have been happy with black and white, but had to settle for the closest choices in duct-tape strength: shell pink and retina-burning blue.  And I haven’t even mentioned the choices in high-tech fabrics. Meshy, wicking, breathable, cool-max, supplex, spandex, lycra.  

One of you will have to go explore the elastic-based supporters for men and report back here.  Do jock straps come in different colors?  

A Shout Out to Sonar X9 edition of 10 Things: Running

Tomorrow is Armed Forces Day in the U.S., a holiday to honor soldiers serving in our five military branches.  Corpus Christi, Texas will also host the 35th annual Beach to Bay Relay Marathon.  Teams of six runners, in the heat and humidity of the early Texas summer (with a threat of thunderstorms), take to the streets, traveling from North Padre Island, over the John F. Kennedy causeway bridge, through Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, and finishing at Cole Park in downtown Corpus Christi.  Each runner takes a leg of about 4 to 4.5 miles beginning at 7 a.m. and finishing when the last walkers and runners cross the finish line and stumble into line for beer and pizza.  

This is no little deal, my friends.  An astonishing 15,000 runners and walkers from all over the world are participating this year.  Among the runners are Sonar X9 and his team of classmates from school.  Eight fourth-graders (some will do their portions together), nine and ten years old, will run the course, each for the first time.  Am I proud?  Heck yeah!  Am I nervous?  Hell yes.  Ok, I’m actually a little scared.  But good scared, excited scared.  Amazed at the perseverance of these kids.  Hopeful that their hard work the past few months will culminate in a good experience for all of them.  

We asked Sonar X9 what it feels like when he’s running.  He said at some point, it feels like his brain is floating free, like his legs are moving by themselves and that they’ll just keep going and going.  How far will they go?  We don’t know yet.  Hopefully they’ll carry him safely through his 4.4 miles tomorrow.  

In honor of these eight kids with a running bug (and the other nearly 15,000 crazy people who’ll be on the course with them tomorrow), I’ve dredged up an old 10 Things about running.  Cheers!

Make a list 1-10.  Tell me, what are the first 10 Things you think of when I say the word RUNNING? Go!!

[Don’t worry, we’re not running out of room.  Just leaving a little breathing space.]

1.  Speed and exhilaration, thrill and fear (of falling, of hurting, of failing)

2.  Blood pounding

3.  Brain free

4.  Muscles sore, then stronger, with sharp edges.  I aspire to the use of the word “chiseled” in my dreams.

5.  Time.  Must squeeze and lever to make the time. 

6.  Energy.  Too easy to give in to other demands and not run.  But when I do run, there is so much energy and electricity. 

7.  Fleeing.  To escape. 

8.  Approaching.  To speed the arrival and diminish the anticipation. 

9.  Racing.  Myself.  A clock.  Other runners.  The pursuer. 

10.  The electric twitch of muscle fiber as it cools and slows and begins to unwrap and build new edges.  

Where will your list run?  

Of Skull-squeezing and Maturity

I ran down the street this morning trying to convince myself that I wanted to run.  I didn’t want to run, but I was doing it anyway.  I had a perfectly reasonable argument about why it would have been better to sleep an extra forty-five minutes.  On this morning, like the past several mornings of running, a song popped into my head.  “That’s How People Grow Up” by Morrissey, delivered with irony, but true nonetheless.  Maturity may represent those moments when we do things even though we don’t want to.  

That sounds more skeptical than I mean it to sound.  I was really pondering self-reliance at the moment the song came to me.  I was considering whether I could rely upon myself to take care of myself.  A blog post yesterday by Jamie Ridler inspired the rumination.  A number of different people rely upon me to do things in any given day.  My children, my partner, other family, friends, teachers, neighbors.  I think I’m fairly trustworthy.  But it has often been the case that I sacrifice my own personal goals and intentions in order to fulfill the needs of others.  This is natural for me, and to a certain extent necessary, as a fully-functioning member of a family and society, but it grates upon me sometimes.  

Another song often occurs to me in those moments of frustration with the world and myself, also Morrissey, singing “Something is Squeezing My Skull,” delivered with the charming aplomb of the chronic depressive putting on a good show.  

I’ve heard some people say, skeptically, that if you don’t take care of yourself no one will.  I don’t completely agree with this sentiment, but it is true for my personal goals and intentions.  If I don’t run, no one will run for me (and what good would that do?).  If I don’t run, no one will force me to run (and I’d resent it if they did).  I could substitute other intentions for running: writing, updating this website, thinking.  If I can’t trust myself to take care of myself physically and emotionally, that could at some point undermine other people’s trust in me. 

So when Morrissey chides me about maturity, I can take it.  Lately I’ve motivated myself with the idea that the morning run is to scrub and tighten.  I scrub out my asthmatic lungs and the fog from my brain.  I tighten up my bones and heart and will.  When I think that way, the skull-squeezing lessens, and so does fear in all of its insidious permutations (Will my work be good enough? Will someone jump out from behind that bush and harm me?)  

I’ve written before that I was inspired to return to running by Haruki Murakami’s memoir about running.  When Murakami talks about running, it is both literal running, and a metaphor for what he can accomplish in himself, and what limits him.  When I talk about running, I am staking out a space in my life for self-reliance.  I can and will take care of myself, physically and mentally.  Don’t ever doubt that running is just as much about my mental health as it is about my physical health.  When my life is frustrating, or the skull-squeezing starts, I run away.  I run away just long enough for the endorphins to kick in, and then I can run back, confident that I can handle anything that comes along because I have taken care of myself.  

When the endorphins kicked in this morning, I did enjoy myself.  Being prickled by maturity is perhaps a good thing.  It’s when I’m prickled by the skull-squeezing that I know it’s time to run.