New shoes

I bought my first pair of running shoes this weekend. That's not quite right. These are the first running shoes I've paid for myself. I've bought dress shoes, casual shoes, hiking shoes, and climbing shoes for myself, but never running shoes. My last pair was the last pair of shoes my parents bought for me. I was in my first year at college and running like a madman, but giving myself tendonitis by doing so in shoes I'd had since junior high. It was Spring of 2000 when Mom and Dad took me to the mall and bought me proper running shoes. I put hundreds of miles and several races on those shoes in the intervening 13 years. A seam in the instep burst almost immediately, making them much more comfortable, but last week they finally broke beyond repair.

People had been giving me a hard time about my shoes for a while already. Apparently you are supposed to replace running shoes every couple of months or after every third run or some such nonsense. I figure as long as there is still rubber on the bottom and the laces still hold, they are probably fine. The tendonitis didn't come back, so why spend money on shoes I only wear in the dark to run through mud? Rosie doesn't care what's on my feet as long as I take her out every morning.

Minimalist running shoes are the "next big thing," but I think it makes sense. Our bodies are built to run, so why strap pillows to our feet to do it? It just leaves the foot weakened and more susceptible to injury. What doesn't make sense is how much a "minimal" shoe costs. By definition, I bought less shoe, but because it is toxic green and trendy, I still paid the same as a cushy shoe with super duper nano air spring technology. We'll see. I wasn't about to buy those ones with the individual toes. That's just gross. Still, I don't have high hopes of them lasting 13 years, though that did seem a bit much. Five miles in, so far, so good. They were my first pair of shoes to come with a warning that they may cause injury if used too much to start. We'll see.

My first truck

My first vehicle was older than me by a year. One year newer than my parents' old van. I was 18 years old when I bought it from a friend. His dad had bought the truck new and after a dozen or so years, sold it to his father. More years later, my friend then bought it from his grandfather with a mind to fixing it up and got about as far as replacing the alternator. His parents wanted it off their yard and my parents were fine with hosting another vehicle, so I bought it. It was an old faded blue Chevrolet pickup truck: 4X4, big V8, and two fuel tanks to feed it. From my increasingly fuzzy memory of fuel prices at the time and how much money I could spend at one filling, that truck must have carried over 200 litres just in fuel.

Not far from my parents' old house is a mountain with a road that goes right to the top. There are telecom towers up there, so the road is sort of maintained. In our teen-aged minds, the towers were just there for climbing, but I'm sure they served another purpose. A four wheel drive is usually required to get all the way up. It wouldn't be a worthwhile mountain for hiking up, but driving up with a truck bed full of firewood and a half dozen of your closest friends was as close to a perfect Friday night as we had back then.

We met at the end of the pavement so those in smaller vehicles could pile into the trucks that were going up. One guy showed up on his dirt bike with no headlight at the front and his girlfriend on the back. They buzzed on ahead and we started up the rutted gravel. Being 18, faster was better. This was my first time as a driver, one of the the lucky ones with a truck, so I wasn't going to be left behind. I also wasn't going to soften the ride for my passengers. That was the way it was. I had bounced around in the back enough times to know. Looking back, it's surprising the things we did without encouragement of alcohol.

As we jostled up that dark mountain, one of the rowdies in the back decided that my driving was too tame. To entertain himself, he climbed up over the cab and onto the hood of my truck. Then he climbed back up on the cab. I took this as a challenge to find every low hanging branch I could and drive under it. After a few good swats, he decided to join us in the already full cab. Head first. He was laying across the laps of the people beside me, trying to get everything in the window when I found a big puddle and soaked his left foot. Those old trucks were great. Even with rust so bad on every quarter panel that you could put your hand through it, a maniac could still surf the hood without denting it.

I sold that rusty truck at the end of the summer to an old miner. He looked as though he should be taking his daily constitutional around the mall with his wife in matching track suits, but he wanted my truck to get down the rough track through the woods he had carved between his gold claim and the road. It was rough enough terrain he had almost died the year before falling off a log between his previous truck and the creek. 18 year olds are not in a position to give life advice to 80 year old miners, so I listened politely and left with his money. I was just relieved when he didn't try to pay in gold.