New Blue Shoes

I should be scrambling around like a madwoman preparing for our weekend wedding trip (so cool—my good friend from college is marrying the love of her life, who happens to be a Namibian!). But instead, I am heeding the call of the blog and sharing this amusement with you…

Yesterday, my dad the avid runner took my husband the recent marathoner and my niece the track team novice to Fleet Feet, a runners’ paradise (shoe store) about an hour away. To Dad, such trips are like pilgrimages to a mini-mecca of the sport that saved him from mid-life misery. To Will, the trip was an obligatory necessity: he’d logged about 100 miles too many in his running shoes, which experts suggest should be replaced every 300 miles or so.

At the end of the day, after Will had returned from the shoe store and I had returned from several hours at work, I asked him, “So, how’d it go? What did Dessa (our niece) get?”

Will: “She got shoes. And some socks, I think.”
Me: “Yes, but what kind?”
Will: “I dunno.”
Me: “Did you get the same kind as last time?”
Will: “No—I’m not really sure what kind they are.”
Me: “What?!”

This amazed me. My dad’s shoe-shopping trips have always been akin to other dads’ car-shopping expeditions. Dad would know the brand, model number, construction type (slip-lasted or board), materials, cushioning levels, reflectivity, and a gazillion other features of the chosen shoe.

Me: “Well, what color are they?”
Will: “Um, I dunno—blue, I think…purple-ish, maybe?”

That’s when the car-shoe analogy really hit me: I’ve never known much about car makes and models. For at least the first three years we owned it, I referred to the Tercel as “our little green
car.” For Will to describe his new running shoes as “blue…or purple-ish” smacked of the same simplistic view of the vehicles that they are. It also occurred to me that the changing of the shoes is like the changing of the oil. Will tends to stretch it out just a little longer than he probably should—the recommended 300 miles becomes 400 or 500 for the shoes, and the 3,000-mile oil-change turns into 4,000 or 5,000 turns of the odometer. At 230,000+ miles, our “Trusty Tercel” can clearly withstand Will’s procrastination. Let us hope his knees can do likewise.

(For the record, Will got Gel-Nimbus 10 Asics in White/Brilliant Blue/Black. They’re board-lasted. I checked.)