Roads, Mills, Laps

On my flight to Texas Friday, I read (and subsequently underlined) the following passage from Irving’s book; it’s about Garp’s running; it’s actually from one of Garp’s short stories: “I concede that the open road is theirs: when I train there I keep my place. I run in the stuff of the soft shoulder, in the hot sand in the gravel, in the beer-bottle glass–among the mangled cats , the maimed birds, the mashed condoms.”

I think I’ve read something similar before, but I can’t remember where.
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Saturday morning, I decided to go for a run. Using this Web site, I found a decent route in Plano and got myself psyched up to run on the surface of Mercury. When I dug into my bag, I found that I had only packed one shoe so I opted to instead run barefoot on the hotel’s Kolehmainen-era Startrac that was stuck at a 5% grade.
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Barefoot running on treadmills, while a noble concept and certainly espoused on some dopey Web site or in some gimmicky book, is not to be undertaken if the balls of the feet aren’t calloused.

Startrac treadmills are squeaky abominations and should be banned outright. In hotels, they never seem to be properly grounded; their belts are Jackson Pollock-like: painted by a hundred sweaty businessmen who’ve been henpecked by their distant wives to do something about their bellyrolls. Paces are never to be trusted–especially anything under 8:45/mile. When one mounts a Startrac, one must expect anything: from instant termination to sudden, 12 mph acceleration. They are deathtraps–capable of snapping your legs off or sending you flying off backwards into the hotel’s unused weight pile where you will crack your skull and lay there (brains exposed) until the Mexican cleaning lady with the yellow dish gloves finds you.
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In chatting about Texas this weekend, someone (a good-hearted Texan with an ax to grind) dropped this little factoid in my head.

No player left behind.
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This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 11:40 am and is filed under Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.