Where there is a will, there is a limp. – Barker Ajax
I would have a great collection of running shoes, if I still had all my running shoes. But I don’t.
I owned a running store, for goodness’ sake. A running magazine.
All the companies rained free gear on me, The World’s Slowest Professional Runner.
I worked at Nike. Hell, I had two promo accounts, still friends with some of the original gangsters there.
[Alberto, email me, buddy!!!]
I would have a great collection, but I don’t.
Somebody – a running shoe geek – asked me, what’s the top shoe of the new year? 2021?
And my answer was, ‘whatever I can get my fucking foot in!’
Preferably, a shoe which offers me a hour’s walk without painful agony.
Pain I can deal with, pain’s my friend. Agony, not so much.
I am good with regular, normal pain. Debilitating, not so much.
Just got out of my post-surgery boot.
My left foot looks like road kill,
off to the side of the street near the ditch.
Angry and a dark red, scabrous but not yet dusty.
Splayed.
I have on old worn out Nikes with a seamless cloth toe.
No seams for me.
Planning to go grocery shopping,
Not staying in the car
reading Leonard Cohen,
Be pushing the cart for the first time in seven weeks.
On my own two feet.
Gained eleven pounds.
Maybe twelve.
It’s true what they say
about huge bowls of chocolate ice cream
every night before bedtime
reading about crazy James Dickey.
The biography is like nine hundred pages
and I own the hard cover.
Have to hold the book up with two hands
Worried I’ll drop it on my head, knock myself out.
The way I do things.
Anyway, before the surgery, I wrote a note to Nike and didn’t send it.
Kept a draft: “When My Foot Survives” was the subject title.
Wanted Nike to send me a new pair of shoes. As my reward for enduring this bullshit.
It was so bad, I found myself comparing forty-five days in a boot to John McCain’s seven-years a POW with the Viet Cong.
But I want Nike to know, we have to move up to men’s size 13 1/2.
Thirteen and a half.
And thus begins comeback number sixty-six. Right there’s a new personal record.
Shoe size biggest ever. That’s two new PRs.
Which, any running shoe geek will tell you, this calls for fresh kicks.
[Phil, buddy, think of the publicity.]
You’ve got a lot of balls,
people tell me.
And it’s true.
Just back from the gonad whisperer.
‘Not going to kill me,’
he whispered,
‘but nothing we can do
you would want done.
Grin and bear it.’
Bear some more.
Get used to it.
I don’t have chronic pain
I have become chronic pain.
‘Avoid insults to your scrotum
and painful agony.’
Pain I can deal with, pain’s my friend, I tell him.
Agony, not so much.
I am good with regular, normal pain.
Debilitating, not so much.
You have probably heard this about me.
‘Bite on a bigger stick’, he advised.
“And don’t come back for a year.’
Don’t come back for a year
music ’round here.
https://www.nike.com/launch/t/space-hippie-01-volt
