Every Picture Tells a Story

sweaty gym kit
sweaty gym kit

This picture shows my gear from my treadmill session at the gym tonight.

Nothing too unusual in anything in the picture. But there are a few stories to be told. Lets start at the bottom:

The Shoes

Brooks Racer ST5.  I wore these shoes as I walked to work this morning. Probably one of the few people to walk down the road in a suit and a pair of racing flats. There has to be a reason of course beyond sheer eccentricity and mine was straightforward. I had to walk to work because Helen needed the car. We live too far from work to walk in shiny work shoes and not far enough away to make it worthwhile running, not that I could have run this morning because the DOMS in my groin (don’t ask) were nipping. I had a treadmill session planned for after work so needed my gear and rather than carry yet another pair of shoes with me it just seemed easier to wear them. I did discover however that the venting in the shoes upper makes for chilly toes on a cold morning! If you are interested the ST5 is a great lightweight shoe, I refer to it as flats for fats because it is supportive enough that less svelt runners like myself can wear them right up to marathon distance. I still think they were faster in the previous colour scheme of blue and orange!

The Shorts

Sugoi 42K. Most marathon shorts are rubbish. I cant understand why manufacturers can’t come up with a split short which has a big zip pocket and some mesh pockets for gels. Most brands have a variation which has some but not all of these features.  The other problem with marathon shorts os that by the time you put a few gels in the pockets you have to pull  the string really tight to stop them falling down when you run. This in turn means that I end up with the skin on my back rubbed away and  bleeding from the elastic on the waistband rubbing.  One more place to have to remeber to apply vaseline. Sugoi gear is really good and the previous version of the sugoi shorts had big mesh pockets but for some bizarre reason they removed them and replaced them with silly flaps on the bum which have velcro fastenings so flimsy that if you put anything into them the fastening comes apart.  I guess at some point I shall have to try out a pair of Race Ready shorts now they are more readily available in this country.

The Towel

A piece of merchandising from the Swiss Alpine Marathon in Davos. This is one of those bucket list races. Scenery to die for, running over the Swiss Alps, you get glaciers, helicopters, alp horns, cow bells, chocolate and red mountain trains. It is also my slowest ever marathon. The altitude absolutely killed me and even though I felt I was running flat out, I was actually running in slow motion.

The Shirt

The shirt sums up this running lark for me. It is from the Little Rock marathon in Arkansas. Little Rock is renowned for the size of its massive marathon medal and for the fact it is the home of Bill Clinton. I haven’t run Little Rock, but was given the t-shirt by a lovely lady called Hobbit (yes Hobbit) at the expo for the marathon in Niagara Falls, Canada. She was there promoting the race and we got chatting, learned she was wanting to come to Scotland to run Loch Ness, exchanged contact details, and she kindly gave us a shirt. We were in Niagara Falls to run the marathon there only 7 days after running the Toronto waterfront marathon. We ran Toronto again this year because it was our first overseas race in 2006 and from running there, we met some wonderful people with whom we are now great friends, and every time we run another race there are more introductions and our circle of friends grows and grows.

So there you go. A routine picture which hides a tale or two.

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