My mom came to town last night to take me shoe shopping. Normally, I would never go shoe shopping with my mother. I have somewhere over 20 pairs of shoes, mostly impractical, scuffed, second hand, and painful. Of course, she doesn’t understand the desire to have as many shoes as absolutely possible and, as mothers are, is really good at saying, “Are you sure you really need those?”
But, this is a special occasion, of sorts. And there was no way I was going to buy this pair of shoes without her help.
These are the shoes we bought:
They’re ASICS Gel-Kayano, and they were, unfortunately, the second most expensive pair in the store.
This is the story. I’m not really into sports much. I’m not good at them. When I played baseball as a 7 year old, my coach put me way out in the field where 7 year olds can’t hit the ball to. When I played soccer, I was left-outside. In the last year I played (grade 8), I was the only person on my team to not score a goal. Besides that, I could never understand the team comraderie. I didn’t like the girls who were good at sports and they didn’t like me. And the boys… mostly just scared me.
So, come high school, I did all the artsy stuff instead. I was in band (oboe), the creative writing club (NOT fan-fiction), Faith Alive (until our teacher supervisor moved to a different school and the club died an agonizing death), and choir. I took English, music, art and history and dreaded the required grade 9 gym class. For a while, it was fun. And then I got sick of it all.
By grade 12, I wanted something new. Of course, at that point, find a place on the soccer team or trying my hand at volleyball were laughable ideas. Instead, I discovered the cross country club. I ran one race that year, came in second last with a time of 33 minutes for 5km, and was so proud of myself and excited about it that I joined the track team later that year. By that point, my motivation had dried up and stayed dried up until the winter of 2009, this year.
To give myself some credit, there has never been a year between now and then when I didn’t spend at least one week or two a couple times a year running steadily. But my desire to run peaks pretty quickly and fades pretty quickly.
In January, for some odd reason, I decided to go for a run. If I lived in California, it probably wouldn’t be so weird. I don’t. I live in Canada. But, in January, I decided to go for a run and four months later, I’m still running regularly. Granted, last week was a failure because I got sick and three weeks before that was not entirely successful either. I didn’t say running regularly meant running every day, or even every week. But it’s still regularly.
And so, we come to real reason I bought the shoes.
My mom wants to run a half-marathon. (She did one last year. She’s almost 49. She is beyond amazing, if you ask me.)
With me.
Surprisingly, this thought doesn’t scare me too much, though I suspect that really, it should scare me a lot. The half-marathon we’re going to do is at the end of September. That’s not very much time to train. And until yesterday, I had shoes that squashed my arches flat or gave me a regular blister along the side of my foot.
Hopefully, these ASICS will provide new motivation.
If they don’t, I’m sure the fact that my mother put down the plastic for them will. Now, I have to run the half-marathon with her. I have been bought!
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