1000 Miles

On October 1st, 2010 I bought my first pair of running shoes. They were inexpensive. It was near the beginning of the school year, so after preparing all the kids for back to school, we were short on money. Being teachers, it's not like it comes flooding back into the coffers once school begins. They were a pair of Nike Free's. Not exactly the best choice for long distance running with a 240 pound runner.

My wife had insisted that I get a new pari of shoes, since I was running on some old pair of walking shoes I had been using for housework. In order to appease her, I bought these from the mall. Some kid brought me several pairs of different shoes to try. I insisted they be on sale. He knew nothing about me, and I knew even less about what I needed. I did know that I was trying to be cheap. Moreover, I had an iphone and wanted to use the Nike+ sensor.

Also, I didn't want to invest in running. This was not the first time I was trying something new. My history said that I would jump in and buy a ton of things that I thought would be necessary. Then after the newness wore off, I would be stuck with a bunch of stuff I never used, or paid a years worth of membership dues for a couple months participation. Failed attempts at businesses and activities litter my house. I wasn't going to invest in yet another failure.

After running in these new shoes for about a month, I knew they wouldn't see me through to the end. I was definitely a heal striker, and although I would begin to evaluate my foot falls more careful in the future, right now I was just trying to get one foot in front of the other. After a little research on twitter, talking to friends, and reading through magazines, I went and bought a pair of new shoes at a running store. My running gait was evaluated and my weight was taken into account. Another pair of Nike's but this time I bought a pair with more support.

Eight hundred and seventy three miles have been clocked on my Nike GPS app plus another 173 on my Nike+ app. That's right, a thousand miles. Although, I know I need a new pair of shoes, its been a hard summer and I'm still not sure I am going to make it out of this summer an intact runner. So, although I am probably going to buy a pair of Brook's Glycerines or Ghosts, I won't have them in time to break them in before the Wine and Dine Half Marathon on October 1st. Moreover, I don't really want new shoes for this run. This run will be a weird triumph. I expect it to be my slowest performance. I expect that I will actually walk part of it (I hope not but hey...). Worse, I have thought long and hard about whether or not I really want to keep running over the past couple of weeks. I'm definitely not going to buy a new pair of shoes now. I'll wait until I'm holding that next medal. Maybe then, I will remember what it was like last autumn, when the weather was changing and the breeze was nice. When I first started running and wasn't bloodying up the front of my shirts. When I didn't care about my pace or my heart rate. When I just kept thinking, "yeah, I can do this."