Pale, Chubby and Slow v. Nasty, Brutish and Short

I've been a city kid all of my life, and growing up on the mean streets of L.A. meant that what outdoors-time I had was limited to concrete and asphalt, and the occasional roll through the prickly grass on the hill of the George C. Page museum, hoping I wouldn't get up with dog poo on my shirt.  My race was pale, personality chubby, and the environment I grew up in was Hobbesian.  Couple my urban upbringing with a love for our local public library and you guessed it, I was the last pick when it came time to choose teams.

As I may have mentioned before, I joined the high school football team for a couple of years on a lark but then discovered that I was slow and not very big, and since the movie "Rudy" hadn't been made yet I decided to quit after my sophomore year of getting concussed.  And although I'd always tried to exercise in some fashion (calisthenics, light jogging) into my adulthood, let's just say that people compliment me on my quick wit and natural beauty rather than my athleticism.

When I started running in earnest this year I even did that indoors, at the gym on a treadmill (ah, climate control) since a big part of my development as a nerd was an aversion to perspiration and getting dirty.  I managed to start getting outdoors this past summer to start running around our local cities and in the process developed a beautiful farmer's tan (my wife likes to say that my face and arms are like Obama, and my torso's like Biden - "Obama, Biden, Obama, Biden" - you could say my wife's a funny lady, or you can say that there's not much excitement going on at our house).  But lately, I've discovered a nascent fondness for trail running.

Frankly, I live in a suburban/urban area (north Orange County) and it's not exactly the great outdoors, but I've found a couple of trails that wind through the local parks.  They're not exactly the Appalachian Trail, unless the Appalachian Trail passes by brightly colored jungle gyms on a frequent basis, but they suffice.

There are trees of varying heights and kinds, grasses, insects, horse and dog poos, perhaps the coyote variant as well, but they're all dirt, and they're all away from the fantastically inattentive drivers who keep forgetting to look for pedestrians.  I've found myself gravitating to them more and more, even the abandoned train tracks by my house that are much more runnable now that the trains have stopped traversing them but even before they've fully been converted to trails, peopled by the occasional huddles of day laborers reading the paper and also escaping the din of motorized traffic.  And it's not that I endorse some absurdist Luddite worldview with a romanticization of preindustrial agrarianism, hells to the no, I love cities 'cause that's where the rock and roll and the museums and the bars are, but when I run, I'm beginning to like running on dirt.

Which is why my current choice of running shoe is a little funny.  The minimalist movement in running endorses less supportive (or perhaps less restrictive) shoes, which was one of the reasons I bought these, the Nike Free Run+:

They're pretty good looking shoes, no?  By the way, the "+" in their name is because of the following:

That grey oval in the footbed is where the Nike footpod of the "Nike+" line of products is supposed to go.  Anyway, those grooves in the sole you saw in the picture above this one are sipes, cuts made into the sole in order to make them more flexible:

And they do the job - the soles are very flexible indeed.  Now, you may be wondering, isn't the point of wearing shoes to be inflexible so you have some support?  Well, the minimalist response is that greater flexibility is important because it forces the arch of your foot to work, which ultimately strengthens it.  By the way, I've always had flat feet.  My childhood summers at the city pool were spent wistfully looking at the elegant wet footprints that other kids left behind, with their curved soles and the toes perfectly arranged above them, whereas since I had no arch I left what looked like a potato crowned by five circles.  But the idea being that more flexibility and less support encourages the bones and ligaments of your feet to do what's natural and thereby strengthening them.

The unintended consequence of using what are essentially urban running shoes on trails is that now, every time I get home I've got approximately a metric ton of pebbles stuck in the sipes.  The shoes themselves are serving their purpose very well, i.e. keeping my Obama-Biden farmer's tan wicked awesome, and I've been very pleased with them, but when I finally wear them out I'll have to start looking in to trail-friendlier alternatives.

And then I'll start looking in to ways to get rid of this crazy farmer's tan.

Train Tracks Trail Run
2.48 mi.  21 min.  8:18 pace.