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By the end of last fall, the tread on my Saucony running shoes was completely gone. Not to mention that several extraneous trim pieces had fallen off, been re-glued, and fallen off again during the preceding spring and summer. And the not-so-extraneous padding at the achilles tendon had been worn away before that.
Still, I hadn't given serious thought to replacing them until several recent excursions down the ice and snow-covered walkways leading to the high school track. That is to say, the several times I nearly fell on my a** because I wasn't even leaving a discernible track in the new snow.
The clincher, though, came the day after I'd integrated a second quarter mile of running into my two-mile daily walk. Several weeks prior, I'd made my last quarter mile a running quarter and, having done so with no ill effects, decided to run the second-to-last quarter as well.
The next day, I felt like the ball of my right foot had been beaten with a baseball bat. My mother used to say, referring to my father, that "You can't hurt a Dutchman by hitting him in the head." Apparently the foot is another matter.
Genetically speaking, I'm only about 1/4 Dutch myself but haven't let that deter me from numerous bone-head decisions. The next day, I went back to the track and did it again. And the next day as well.
By the fourth day, I was ready to say "Uncle Dietrich [expletive deleted] Knickerbocker!" I would apologize to Washington Irving for that, but he did use the family name for monetary gain and without permission.
My wife, on the other hand, would've let him off the hook if he'd just shared the money. Her reply, when I explained my immediate and desperate need for new running shoes, was that I should consult one of the catalogs where she gets free shipping on cut-rate sneakers.
You know, the ones you NEED free shipping on because you send them back 3-4 times over a period of as many weeks before you get the right fit. I'd have been a double amputee by the time I completed that process. Don't marry a nurse if you're someone who expects sympathy more than once or twice in thirty-plus years.
Finally she relented but only after I agreed to not b*tch about driving her to the casino for the third time this week. At first she tried to tell me they were offering a pair of Nike Pegasus as a grand prize on the electronic slots. But I told her I couldn't picture anyone being excited about that in a place where half the clientele is dragging around portable oxygen tanks while puffing on duty-free cigarettes. I know, another astonishing failure of the imagination on my part.
Anyway, the next day I drove to two of the bigger shopping malls in town. I first tried the Shoppingtown Mall in Dewitt because that's where I'd gotten my Sauconys at a FootLocker a year and a half earlier. But the FootLocker was gone and its former storefront was among several that now stood empty. Nothing quite as depressing as an semi-urban mall that's so obviously on borrowed time.
In fact, one of the surviving anchor stores is a Dick's Clothing & Sporting Goods. But, having been treated with an indifference bordering on contempt the last time I tried to buy shoes there, I decided not even to bother. Because I'm pretty sure I can get THAT kind of treatment without leaving the house.
Instead, I opted for the Finish Line where a young girl tried to sell me a pair of Brooks that had a curl in the toe of the right shoe which needed only a bell on the end of it to look like something worn by the fool at the court of Louis XIV. When I pointed it out, she just shrugged, put it back in the box and took it back to the stock room where even now it awaits the arrival of someone about 5' tall with big nose and feet and bells sewn on his pointy hat.
After that, I tried a couple other stores before going to the Carousel Center where I had similar luck. (However, I did meet a real salesman at the Sports Authority. This guy made a determined effort to sell several pairs of high end sneakers that had been drastically reduced because they wouldn't have sold from the trunk of the neighborhood fence on "Everybody Hates Chris.")
The next day, I decided to swallow my pride and limped into the Dick's at Shoppingtown. That was Sunday, it was early, and the sales people were actually quite nice. Probably hoping for someone to write them a decent recommendation, having seen the handwriting on the vacant walls of the adjacent wing.
Anyway, as I was perusing the various shoe displays, I came across the latest incarnation of the Saucony Excursion, the very shoe that had seen me through those painful post-surgery days when I was struggling to keep up with my daughter on our first few walks around the block.
Now, if I were a serious runner, or aspiring to be such, I might've had second thoughts. At best though, I'm closing in on my last days at the track and, being a bit older and wiser as well, I'm not quite as prone to let aspirations outrun physical and financial realities.
So I told the guy I'd wear them home and dumped my ratty-looking sandals into the box. Those would be the hiking sandals I'd bought four years before my now-defunct running shoes and had worn all over Key West, San Francisco, North Tahoe and East Syracuse. When I went through the checkout line, the girl at the register opened the box in case I was one of those white, sixty-five year old, middle-class shoplifters.
The second she opened it, I knew I'd struck a ringing blow for racial profiling. You'd have thought she had a bottle of two-dollar gin under the counter the way she dove for the hand sanitizer. After which she seemed a lot less friendly.
Apparently, even in hard times, folks'll only do so much for that exit reference...
LPK
LiveJournal
1.25.2010
Still, I hadn't given serious thought to replacing them until several recent excursions down the ice and snow-covered walkways leading to the high school track. That is to say, the several times I nearly fell on my a** because I wasn't even leaving a discernible track in the new snow.
The clincher, though, came the day after I'd integrated a second quarter mile of running into my two-mile daily walk. Several weeks prior, I'd made my last quarter mile a running quarter and, having done so with no ill effects, decided to run the second-to-last quarter as well.
The next day, I felt like the ball of my right foot had been beaten with a baseball bat. My mother used to say, referring to my father, that "You can't hurt a Dutchman by hitting him in the head." Apparently the foot is another matter.
Genetically speaking, I'm only about 1/4 Dutch myself but haven't let that deter me from numerous bone-head decisions. The next day, I went back to the track and did it again. And the next day as well.
By the fourth day, I was ready to say "Uncle Dietrich [expletive deleted] Knickerbocker!" I would apologize to Washington Irving for that, but he did use the family name for monetary gain and without permission.
My wife, on the other hand, would've let him off the hook if he'd just shared the money. Her reply, when I explained my immediate and desperate need for new running shoes, was that I should consult one of the catalogs where she gets free shipping on cut-rate sneakers.
You know, the ones you NEED free shipping on because you send them back 3-4 times over a period of as many weeks before you get the right fit. I'd have been a double amputee by the time I completed that process. Don't marry a nurse if you're someone who expects sympathy more than once or twice in thirty-plus years.
Finally she relented but only after I agreed to not b*tch about driving her to the casino for the third time this week. At first she tried to tell me they were offering a pair of Nike Pegasus as a grand prize on the electronic slots. But I told her I couldn't picture anyone being excited about that in a place where half the clientele is dragging around portable oxygen tanks while puffing on duty-free cigarettes. I know, another astonishing failure of the imagination on my part.
Anyway, the next day I drove to two of the bigger shopping malls in town. I first tried the Shoppingtown Mall in Dewitt because that's where I'd gotten my Sauconys at a FootLocker a year and a half earlier. But the FootLocker was gone and its former storefront was among several that now stood empty. Nothing quite as depressing as an semi-urban mall that's so obviously on borrowed time.
In fact, one of the surviving anchor stores is a Dick's Clothing & Sporting Goods. But, having been treated with an indifference bordering on contempt the last time I tried to buy shoes there, I decided not even to bother. Because I'm pretty sure I can get THAT kind of treatment without leaving the house.
Instead, I opted for the Finish Line where a young girl tried to sell me a pair of Brooks that had a curl in the toe of the right shoe which needed only a bell on the end of it to look like something worn by the fool at the court of Louis XIV. When I pointed it out, she just shrugged, put it back in the box and took it back to the stock room where even now it awaits the arrival of someone about 5' tall with big nose and feet and bells sewn on his pointy hat.
After that, I tried a couple other stores before going to the Carousel Center where I had similar luck. (However, I did meet a real salesman at the Sports Authority. This guy made a determined effort to sell several pairs of high end sneakers that had been drastically reduced because they wouldn't have sold from the trunk of the neighborhood fence on "Everybody Hates Chris.")
The next day, I decided to swallow my pride and limped into the Dick's at Shoppingtown. That was Sunday, it was early, and the sales people were actually quite nice. Probably hoping for someone to write them a decent recommendation, having seen the handwriting on the vacant walls of the adjacent wing.
Anyway, as I was perusing the various shoe displays, I came across the latest incarnation of the Saucony Excursion, the very shoe that had seen me through those painful post-surgery days when I was struggling to keep up with my daughter on our first few walks around the block.
Now, if I were a serious runner, or aspiring to be such, I might've had second thoughts. At best though, I'm closing in on my last days at the track and, being a bit older and wiser as well, I'm not quite as prone to let aspirations outrun physical and financial realities.
So I told the guy I'd wear them home and dumped my ratty-looking sandals into the box. Those would be the hiking sandals I'd bought four years before my now-defunct running shoes and had worn all over Key West, San Francisco, North Tahoe and East Syracuse. When I went through the checkout line, the girl at the register opened the box in case I was one of those white, sixty-five year old, middle-class shoplifters.
The second she opened it, I knew I'd struck a ringing blow for racial profiling. You'd have thought she had a bottle of two-dollar gin under the counter the way she dove for the hand sanitizer. After which she seemed a lot less friendly.
Apparently, even in hard times, folks'll only do so much for that exit reference...
LPK
LiveJournal
1.25.2010
