Fancy New Trail Running Shoes

At some point last week, as I was bending and flexing my Nike Free Runs and listening to the chunks of gravel falling out of the little square treads, I knew I had a choice to make. It was a choice between inconvenience and expense, and if you know me at all, you know I chose to spend the money.

See, the gravel road by my house is so blasted convenient. When I'm not running with Jennifer, I can run on Meth Alley and no one drives by, ever. It is quiet. Sometimes there are deer. It's nice there. Aside from the meth, but that happened late at night last summer, and now the police drive through that area so often, I think Meth Alley is going to get its name changed to "Formerly Meth Alley." The only problem with (Formerly) Meth Alley is the gravel. My shoes are minimalist. That means less cushioning between me and the road, less chunks of rubber and foam keeping me from feeling what I'm running on, less chances for me to trip over giant objects because my brain accounts for my feet, not my feet AND shoes. But the gravel sticks in the awesome tread on my shoes, meaning I am essentially running ON rocks. The rocks become a part of my shoe and I carry those rocks with me until I get home, which is when I spend a good amount of time removing all the gravel and using it to replenish the driveway.

I could choose not to ever run on Meth Alley again, despite the convenience, the pretty scenery, and the lack of scary trucks careening past me at 65mph. OR, I could choose to buy trail running shoes.

I have tried driving out to Murder Trail. It sucks. The drive is 30 minutes both ways, and if I run for 30 minutes, that's an hour and a half out of my day that I could be spending doing something else, like sleeping. Plus, that's gas I could use to, I don't know, visit someplace cool someday.

All this led to the running store and my new fancy shoes. They are made just for trail running, and nothing can get caught in the treads. I know. I did a second run today, after the morning one, just to test them out on Meth Alley, and not a stone got stuck in my shoes and I never slipped on the gravel once.

This is a vast improvement.

Please ignore my ghostly pale skin.

Plus, they are red, which makes me feel faster. Don't they make you think, "The girl wearing these is super-speedy?" Well you're wrong. I'm the slowest runner around. But I try.

The lady at Three Rivers Running Company was incredibly nice. I walked in and sounded way more knowledgeable than I really am. I told her I wanted trail running shoes that were lightweight and airy. She pulled out four pairs for me to try on, with varying degrees of stability. I'm supposed to wear a stabilizing shoe, but I find that type of shoe leads me to fall on my face, so we found one with the lowest amount of correction, enough to help me out but not enough to make me trip.

These are by Montrail and are named "Bajada." I should look that word up but I probably never will. Bonus points for the person who does. They are slightly narrow, which is perfect for my feet, and when I saw the color I thought, "This is so weird that it's COOL." They come in other colors for the less awesome people who choose not to wear shoes that blind other runners.

My skin actually glows in direct sunlight,
like in Twilight only with less bloodsucking.

They really are great to run in, and I'm looking forward to my next opportunity to run in them, which won't be tomorrow because I'm working and then going straight to Indy for a play. But Sunday, hopefully, I will get to go play run.

In Which Laura Runs 5K, Somehow

Well, my toe must be feeling better, because today I accidentally ran 5K.

I went for a run on Murder Trail, and as I ran along, I thought, "Gee, this running section seems like it's taking FOR-EV-ER. Maybe I missed the command to walk? Nah."

I had not skipped walking. No. Instead, I had failed to read the instructions for Day Two of Week Five, which state, and I'm paraphrasing, "Five minute warm-up. Run eight minutes. Walk five minutes. Run eight minutes. Five minute cool-down."

Heh. So I ran eight minutes. And I didn't look at my phone, so when it told me during the walking section that I was halfway done, I laughed at it because the app was crazy to think that only one running and half a walking section was halfway. Halfway was supposed to be mid-second running section, because I thought the day's instructions were, "Five minute warm-up. Run five minutes. Walk three minutes. Run five minutes. Walk three minutes. Run five minutes. Five minute cool-down." But I was wrong.

So I started running the second eight-minute block, still thinking I was supposed to run five minutes, until I passed the two mile marker and kept going. This made me think something was wrong, because I really shouldn't have passed the two mile marker if I wasn't yet halfway done. So I paused the app and checked.

Only then did I realize that I'd run eight minutes with little to no misery. Way to go, me! Only then did I realize that I was two miles from my car and...essentially done running. Great.

So I finished the running block, walked five minutes, then did another running block of eight minutes. Judging from my GPS app, that took me up to OVER three miles of running! This means that, if I can cut out the walking in the middle, I will have no problem running the 5K in June. My body CAN run 5K in one day. I can do it. This is awesome.

In other news, a giant log fell from the sky and took out a section of fence on the trail. I checked, but there were no bodies underneath the log, meaning it did not kill anyone, unless the victims were already removed. This means that nature is not the murderer on Murder Trail. 

(For the record, I will never run on Murder Trail if I see a Camaro parked at the trailhead. Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear says Camaros are only driven by murderers, and he knows about cars, so he must be right.)

Tomorrow I head to the running store, and the running store people will help me find the perfect trail running shoes, so I can go back to running down Meth Alley by my house. Sometimes the drive to Murder Trail sucks. Also the drive home, when I am sweaty and gross, sucks.

Today when I ran, the temperature rose to over 80 degrees. I have never been so sweaty in my life. I am just thankful that nobody was around to see me, because I bet I looked like Mickey Rourke, only without the steroid abuse. (Although Mickey Rourke sweats while he is sitting down and relaxed. At least I had the excuse of running three miles in 80 degree heat.)

What Life Is Like Toe-day

Yes, I did make a terrible joke in the title. No, I am not sorry.

Last night, as my toe throbbed, I went on Facebook and accosted my friend Erica, who is a nurse (or is about to be, not sure when she graduates). I asked her if toes fall off on their own, or if they just hurt like this in order to convince their owners to break out the hedge clippers and do the job ourselves.

Erica was slightly grossed out by the hedge clipper remark.

However, she told me she thought I had dislocated my toe. She said it probably would feel better in a few days, and that I should ice it in the meantime. She told me removing the toe would not be necessary. It should stay where it belongs. It belongs on my foot, apparently.

I decided to trust her, so I went to sleep.

This morning, it felt SO MUCH BETTER. It was like magic. Instead of having agony that was, like a 9 on the pain scale (speaking as someone who has had their abdomen scissored open and organs pulled out and mailed to the Mayo Clinic, and therefore knows the pain scale well). Today, it is like a 2. In fact, it is only a 2 when I am actively walking around. It is a 0 when I am not walking around.

It turns out, toes are forgiving appendages.

I am still not running today, because if my toe gets angry about the running, I could end up miserable again. I hate misery, so no running.

I also am going to the running store on Friday, where I am getting trail running shoes, because I am not running on sidewalks nearly as much as I am running on the gravel road by my house (Meth Alley), and gravel requires different shoes. Trail running shoes, in fact. Trail running shoes are fancy, because they're designed to make it so you don't feel like you're running barefoot on gravel. My current shoes make me feel like I'm running barefoot on gravel. (It is possible that this contributed to the toe agony.)

I would not buy new shoes, because I am cheap, except my friend Pam made a face when I told her about my road running shoes and how I was using them on gravel, and she gave me a grave warning. The face was something like terror, and the warning involved a story about her foot and the hideous agony that led her to have to buy Vibrams, better known as the toe-shoes, in order to escape horrible pain.

These are Vibrams. They are designed to repel friends and loved ones.

I do not want to have to be in horrible pain. I also do not want to have Vibrams. I am really glad they worked for Pam, but she is normal. I am a freaky weird person, and if I put on Vibrams, I would look even MORE freakish, and I would be driven from society. Possibly with pitchforks.

I also do not want to damage myself, though, so because I Googled lots of toe health things trying to figure out what's wrong with me, I now I have toe-spacers. These are gel insert things that you put between your big toes and second toes in order to encourage the big toes to become straight so that you don't develop bunions or have to have a doctor break both toes for clinical purposes and reset them so they will be straight. I am wearing them now. They feel like flip flops, only the gel is way more comfortable than the average flip flop. You put them between your toes, then put on your socks and shoes to hold them in place.

They are odd. But hopefully they will make my toes look less terrifying, and, more importantly, they will make it so no one has to take a sledgehammer to my feet for clinical purposes. That sounds clinically painful.

The One About Laura's Weird Feet (and How Easy It Is to Break Them)

It is possible that I shattered my own bone yesterday. If I did not destroy the bones of my left big toe, I did some other damage to it, because I have never woken up mid-scream before.

See, yesterday I was putting on my shoes to take Darcy out, and as I did so, my left big toe felt odd. It usually feels nothing, because due to my freakishness, my big toes actually lean toward my index-toes. This means when I line my feet up, instead of having my big toes parallel to each other, they instead point away from each other. If you were to trace a line alongside each big toe and then close the top, you would end up with a nice triangle.

These are not my feet, but this is what it looks like. That picture is from this blog post that talks about the horrors of high heels with narrow toe boxes. That was not what caused my toes to be weird. I always wore classic 90's clunky boots with huge toe boxes, so how my toes ended up snuggling together is anyone's guess. They have been this way since I was a kid.

Toes are so gross. Once I went into a Borders with a close-up picture of a bunch of people's feet lined up hanging on the wall in the cafe. I am convinced that it was why the Borders chain failed. Who wants to eat a scone when they're looking at gross feet? No one, that's who.

My big toes have two main problems (1) there is a space along the top of my big toes that is essentially numb and (2) sometimes my big toe joints crack or pop, which I always assume is their way of going back where they belong. They do this on their own. All my joints crack and pop, so it isn't really abnormal for me. Still, I'd rather none of my joints ever pop. That's just a personal preference.

As I put on my shoes yesterday, my left big toe popped. It made an audible snapping noise, the kind of noise a twig makes when you crack it.

The noise was not immediately followed by pain, so I continued with my day, went to sleep, and woke up to my alarm this morning.

When the alarm went off, I rolled over as I always do to turn the thing off, still half asleep. What really woke me up was the howl of protest from my left big toe. My alarm and my scream woke me up the rest of the way. Fortunately, the scream was muffled by pillows.

It does not seem to be a bone problem. I still can bend and move the toe normally. It is not bruised and does not appear swollen. But oh, my. The last time I was in this sort of pain, I had been scissored open by a doctor and chunks of me were removed and thrown away. I don't know what tendon or muscle snapped or popped free, but it had to have been something important, because putting on socks brought tears to my eyes.

I drove to work holding my left foot up off the floor so that nothing touched it, because no one deserves that much pain. I considered taping up my toe, in the hope that it would help, but the only tape we have at home is latex surgical tape, which would kill me. So instead I sit here, waiting for my toe to just finish falling off the rest of the way so I could move on with my life.

Oh it hurts. Please send English toffee and lots of ibuprofen. Maybe send ice, too.

I Am Not Portuguese

It was bound to happen. We all knew it. I mean, I've been making inappropriate murder jokes for the last three weeks, because I knew something was bound to happen to me when I was running alone. I mean, really. I attract all the freaks and weirdos. They can see me coming from miles away, and I draw them to me with my ability to politely listen and feign interest in their stories even as I internally panic and look for the nearest door, policeman, machete, or getaway vehicle.

Yes, I met someone running yesterday.

He was mid-sixties, normal-looking (as most freaks and weirdos are), and he seemed (again, as most freaks and weirdos do), friendly and non-threatening. And really, in the scheme of things, he was nonthreatening. He was weird and racist, but not in a scalp-you-and-leave-you-for-dead way, just in a grew-up-ignorant-and-uneducated-in-the-rural-Midwest sort of way.

I was following the app when the man waved, smiled, and said "have you seen any mushrooms around yet?"

(This is a normal greeting where I am from. It is mushroom hunting season. People of all walks of life use every spare second traipsing through the outdoors looking around the bases of trees for morel mushrooms, which are then consumed or sold at an excessively high price. I found one mushroom, once. It tasted like a mushroom. The sort you can buy at the grocery. Mushroom-hunting isn't my sort of springtime hobby.)

"No," I said. "Are they up yet?"

(This is the normal response.)

"Well, they're really tiny now. We'll get them in the next couple weeks, once it gets a bit warmer."

This was when I thought the conversation was over. But no.

"Do you mind my asking, what's your father's name?"

(I get this a lot, too. Everyone knows my dad. So I told him, because everyone already knows Dad.)

"That's what I thought," he said. "You have the kind of face I'm looking for."

My brain automatically filled in, "as a mask to cover my own face in the Satanic spring rights I plan to perform after ritualistically murdering you and using your blood to season the mushrooms I am currently collecting." He didn't say it, but he didn't have to.

"It's your eyebrows," he continued. "I've been doing lots of research, trying to look up all my family's background. After a while, you can tell a person's ancestry by looking at them. You're from Portugal. I can tell by your eyebrows. You have Portuguese eyebrows."

This is wildly inaccurate.

"You have a Portuguese last name, too."

Except no.

My last name is so German that German people read it and pronounce it the German way automatically, because it is still spelled the way that it's spelled in Germany. German people tell me I'm pronouncing my own name wrong so often that I've begun to tell them, "That's not what the officials told us on Ellis Island," even though none of my family ever went through Ellis Island.

I corrected him, to no avail. He went on to explain to me how my last name was derived from an actual Portuguese word for "boot" whereas the German word for that was totally different. I tried to explain that we weren't named after shoes, and that my last name means "purse-maker" and is hard-core medieval, but he was already on to explaining his own ethnic and racial background.

"I was Amish," he said. "I'm not anymore, but I used to be. I grew up only speaking Pennsylvania-Dutch, and when I started first grade, I couldn't speak a word of English!"

Amish people don't usually murder people and make clothes out of their victim's skin, do they?

"My mother was 5/8 Cherokee," he said. "The Portuguese were the first people over here. They came before anybody else. They were here before the Cherokee were here. Back then, the Cherokee were Aztec, because "Cherokee" means "Aztec." The Portuguese were here, and then the Cherokee came through, and then they married and had kids, and then the Europeans and Columbus came."

I don't even know where to start with all of that.

"My one daughter looks Cherokee. She has the v-shaped jaw. My other daughter looks Portuguese."

I wanted to ask if his wife had any guy friends who looked Cherokee and/or Portuguese, which would explain why his daughters looked so dissimilar. But I thought that might be rude.

"Yeah, I can trace my ancestry back to 260 B.C."

At this point I really began to wonder where Mum and The Brother were. They were behind me with Darcy. See? Crazies even find you when you are smart and you run with people. They hunt you down and tell you they can trace their family line back to the Mesozoic era, when their ancestor was a bit of algae clinging to the toenail of a dinosaur after it trekked through a pond on its way to die however dinosaurs really died.

"You know Jacob and Esau?" He asked. "One was real pale and fair. The other was all dark and hairy. He was the first Indian."

The last time I heard that argument I was in an African American literature class, and we were discussing the Jim Crow laws, the one-drop rule, and the religious propaganda people produced to tell people why it was okay to not treat others equally based on their skin color. Plus, the whole idea of walking up to someone and insisting you know their race or ethnicity or nationality isn't just racist, it's also beyond rude. You need to know a great deal about anthropology before you can look at someone's bone structure and tell with certainty what their background is. Five minutes on a website isn't going to cut it.

Finally, I broke away and finished my run. I passed my mother and brother, then had to wait for them to catch up at the end of the trail. Guess who beat them to the trailhead?

If you guessed the You-Are-Portuguese Guy, you were right.

He continued on his bizarre tirade almost exactly where he'd left off. And he proceeded to tell me that any name with a "ton" at the end, was not Anglo-Saxon, but actually Portuguese. That meant that instead of being English, both the German--I mean Portuguese--and the English side of my family were actually Portuguese, making me double Portuguese because eyebrows.

I told him he was wrong, and that "-ton" was pure Saxon.

"Everybody conquered everybody in those days," he said. "You're Portuguese. I speak Dutch. I know about the Portuguese language."

(Except Portuguese is a Romance language, and therefore Latin. Dutch is not Latin-based. So he would know nothing about Portuguese at all, unless he had studied it or Latin.)

Now, Portugal has a rich and beautiful history. I am way pro-Portugal. But seriously, I am not Portuguese, and I was getting pretty offended that he kept telling me I was, especially because I know all about where this sort of "science" he was using comes from.

Ever heard of anthropometry? The Nazis loved it. Here you go.

Fortunately, Mum and Paul arrived before I decided it was a good idea to punch the man in the face or tell him just how racist he is. But they arrived just before I lost it completely. If I had been in possession of a match, I would have lit myself on fire just to escape the conversation. It would have burned off my "Portuguese" eyebrows, perhaps shutting him up for good.

Why do these freaks and weirdos seek me out? Do I have a "come talk to me about racist/offensive stuff" face?

Clearly bringing a buddy running with me is only effective if they keep up with me, because having Mum and The Brother along did nothing to discourage Racist You-Are-Portuguese guy. Maybe pepper spray would have, but he wasn't being threatening in any way.

I am buying pepper spray this weekend anyway. I will brandish it to discourage conversation in case I ever see this man again.

Keeping Laura Sane

I try not to talk a ton about having an anxiety disorder. It sucks, but I live with it. This week I was talking to my aunt, and she mentioned this thing that happens when she is peacefully sleeping, in which her body wakes her up--fully--and leaves her unable to sleep ever again (that night...presumably she can sleep again at some other point in time).

That reminded me of me, because that happens to me often, except instead of just feeling fully awake, I feel as though I am about to die on my own or be brutally murdered, and I lie awake in the dark in sheer terror until I either manage to calm myself down or just get up and do laundry.

For a while this happened so often that I finished all the laundry and moved on to working out a solution. It took some creative thinking, but now I did it. I now have a method of dealing with the panicked wake-up thing, so I told my aunt. Basically, I play this song in my head:



If you listen to this song, you will notice that it's very easy to pick out the meter. So easy, in fact, that you might find yourself tapping your toe involuntarily when the song is playing. Try it. Musical people don't have to. You already know what I'm talking about.

Here's the trick: play the song in your head. Only instead of playing it as quickly as Julie Andrews sings it, speed up or slow down the tempo to match your heartbeat*, or match it to the sound of a ticking clock in your room. Focus on that, and only on that, and you can fall asleep again. It has never failed me. This trick beat jet-lag in Europe. If it can do that, it can do anything.

I also have other panic-attack reducing tricks. Most of my panic attacks are related to not living up to someone's expectations of me, or a feeling of lack of control. This is sort of handy, because there were a few things I could do right away to reduce the amount of sobbing and shaking I had to put up with everyday.

I know this weekend is going to be anxiety-inducing, so I thought I would share my tips with you, in case they might help you the way they've helped me.

Basically these are what my once-upon-a-time therapist called "healthy boundaries," a.k.a., rules to set to keep you from shaking in the corner, certain death is around the corner**.

The five simple rules are as follows:

1. I never agree to do anything unless I am certain I can do it. No knee-jerk agreements to commitments that I will freak out about at the last minute when I realize that I'm terrible at public speaking, at math, at caring for infants, you get the idea.
2. I tell people NO. This is related to #1. All my life, I have been a people-pleaser. I still have a hard time refusing to do something when someone asks, so I have started telling people I'll "check my schedule" or "think about it and get back with you" when someone asks me to commit to doing something. Then I can calmly decide whether the thing is something I can really do, and then I will be able to plan out my refusal so that it isn't just "NO STOP CALLING ME I WON'T YOU CAN'T MAKE ME." 
3. I won't agree to any last minute project or major responsibility. Say someone calls and says, "I need a poster for the front of this room, and it has to be done tomorrow..." Nope. I know I can't deal with not putting a lot of time into a craft project. I will worry, obsess, stop sleeping, skip meals, cry, and have several panic attacks to get a simple poster finished by the time limit. I also won't run an event if asked last-minute. Nope. Not happening.
4. I offer alternatives. If someone needs help and I want to help but don't feel as if I can do what they're asking, I will offer to do only part of the task.
5. I don't pick up all the slack. In school, if I was in a group project and the group wasn't working, I did all the work myself. If four of us were writing the paper, I wrote the entire paper when other students didn't turn in their portion of the work on time. I have stopped doing this. It took me ages to realize that the work other people fail to do only reflects on them, and not on me.

None of these are easy to do if you're a perfectionist over-achieving people-pleaser, but I promise, with practice, they are something you can accomplish.

I only know one person who has a problem with me saying no, not jumping in at the last minute to fix everything, and not doing their job for them. The hard part is knowing that that's their problem, not mine. It's tough not to back down, but every time I stick to my five rules, I feel better about life, the universe, and everything.

Plus it means I can keep going without being a puddle of misery and endless sorrow, so that's awesome.

If you're ever in charge of anything, and you want to keep your subordinates happy, remember this little axiom for me (I promise more people will love you if you do): "You can't delegate if you procrastinate." It's a good rule.

More people should follow this rule.

* If you are having a panic attack, you will probably be able to hear your heartbeat just fine. If your heart rate and blood pressure are normal, find your pulse on your neck or wrist.

** Sometimes healthy boundaries mean you keep destructive people at arm's length. Sometimes they mean you don't sign up for a certain committee because Person X is on that committee and they trigger anxiety.

Running, a List of Things

• Today I ran for five straight minutes, TWICE, and I didn't even die.
• I also ran for three minutes, twice, and didn't die from that, either.
• Running kills you less than I was formerly led to believe.
• I am still panicking about the 5K I signed up for.
• I considered counting how many weeks of training I can fit in before said 5K, but I became frightened and didn't do it.
• I don't want you to count, either.
• I am already planning to do this.
• You should come run it with me.
• Saturday I run with Jennifer again, and she has until then to decide whether she wants to do the three minute-five minute-three minute-five minute running plan or the one we did on Monday. 
• Let's all stare at Jen until she decides.