Day #2: Poo Shoes

I stepped in dog poo a week or so ago--it wasn't my fault, it usually never is. Which is to say, I didn't do it intentionally. I was walking down the street in a pair of "semi-retired" running shoes when I noticed a car barreling down my side of the road. Now, I'm what you might consider a dabbler in the fine art of self-preservation. It's just something I tend to do from time to time. I enjoy it. So the instinctual me, witnessing the girl behind the wheel looking down and to the right at what I can only assume was a text message, or thumbing through her ipod's Katy Perry playlist, thought the safest place for me to be was out of the way of the advancing automobile. Logical me agreed, and with an alarming quickness I followed their lead off to the side of the road. That would turn out to be the fatal step…well fatal in the sense that it was literally not so much, but the potential was there, possibly. So the car passes and I'm standing in dog poo. What is one to do? Neither instinctual nor logical me have a fail-safe for this scenario, so with slumped shoulders I sulked my way home. One could almost hear the Vince Guaraldi Trio playing on the heels of my traipsing footfalls.  

Anyway…about the running…today was a miserably rainy day, and being the second official day of my marathon training I wasn't going to entertain the idea of skipping out. Every day counts, even this early on: a precedent must be set. So the optimist within me sought long and hard before spotting a silver lining in the brown cloud, as it were, that had plagued my life a week prior. Though I had spent a good amount of time and chemicals cleaning the dog poo from my running shoes, there was still a lingering sense of something unsettling about the idea of what had happened to them. In consideration of the wet weather outside my window I decided it was the perfect condition for a further cleansing of my shoes. I would, in essence, take them to the rain-dro-mat, for a more thorough washing. I gingerly tied up the laces and was off. 

Given my choice of elements to run in, I'd probably pick a straight up rain over excessive heat, extreme winds, or snow, any day of the week. Don't get me wrong, running on a rainy day is never truly a good idea. Among the plethora of egregious aspects to deal with, you have slick surfaces, soggy socks, decreased visibility, and small reservoirs of muddy road water to leap over at any given intersection. At this time of year, with autumn fresh in the air, a leafy patch covering acorns scattered beneath its sprawl is a trap of slap-stick comedic calamity waiting to spring. The Japanese have wise words of warning one should abide by: 気をつけて。Be cautious, be careful. 

Today, with the cleanliness of my soles at the forefront of my thought process I embraced the puddles. Though I wouldn't say I recklessly ran towards them, as much as I just half-heartedly avoided them, ending up with soaked, but stench-free, shoes all the same. I'm pretty sure this method worked quite well. Though I left them banished to the basement to dry out overnight, as if they had done something wrong. If nothing else, the rain-dro-mat went a long way in assuaging the neurosis over the initial problem. Once they dry out, they should be in prime form for future walks in the coming weeks. As for now, much of my cross training days will be dedicated to walking. I realize that walking flirts dangerously close with its cousin running slowly, and therefore, almost incestuously, takes much of the "cross" out of the training, since you're exercising many of the same muscles, but from a recovery/biomechanics stand point, you're not attacking those joints and muscles with the same stressful ferocity as a run. So it works quite well in a pinch. Ideally, once I fix the flat tire on my bicycle, I'll be using that as my main source of cross training. But who knows when I'll actually get around to making that happen, since I don't even have a presta pump to put air in the tire once it's fixed/replaced. Someday…