I Like Nike

I'm sorry for the problems!  The picture should be up now.

(Of course the "Nike" in the title is meant to be read the way I pronounced it as a girl, with the silent "e".  Also, I don't actually like Nike (or at least not the ones I'll be writing about) so pretty much every single thing about that title is wrong, except for that you can take out the "N" out of it and have a rhyming political catch phrase from the 50's, which  I'm assuming you already knew.  And if you didn't then everything about the title is wrong)

There was a time in my life when I did more than just sit on my lazy rear all day.  I ran cross country and track in tenth grade (yes, only tenth grade).  Since then I have loved running off and on.  Mostly off, though.  

My second year at Ricks College I started to notice that my pants weren't fitting me right (or at all) and also that I hadn't eaten a single vegetable in months.  I was getting up to clean the library every morning at 4am and my health wasn't the best anyway.  I decided to get it in gear.  

I started eating things like a bowlful of canned green beans (I used to believe that those were vegetables)  for a snack or meal.  I also decided to start exercising in the mornings after my shift at the library instead of going home and going back to sleep.

First I tried weight lifting.  With free weights.  Free weights are no good for people with spastic tendencies so I decided to try running.  It was winter (and you don't know winter till you've experienced one in Rexburg Idaho) so I had to use the indoor track, which was eight laps to the mile. 

Running around a tiny little circle in a dark room at seven in the morning after vacuuming and mopping floors and removing gum from carpets for three hours.  I was dedicated.

So much so, in fact that over the Christmas break while I was back home I decided to buy some new running shoes.  My old Saucony's that I just LOVED were dying and needed replacing.  I went shopping with Erin, my best friend from high school, who also attended Ricks and with whom I regularly swapped stories about the guys we had crushes on.

It came down to some UGLY-but-perfect-in-every-other-way Saucony's, or some cutest-shoes-on-planet-earth-but-much-more-like-not-very-comfortable-cross-trainers-than-running-shoes Nike's.  I ran laps in the mall a few times with each pair, and there was no question which pair I should get.  I already loved Saucony's as my runni

ng shoe of choice, and these ones felt GREAT.  But why did they have to be ugly and gray and bright orange (or what is yellow)?  (the Nike's were mostly white with a little bit of turquoise and dark purple.  Remember 1995?)

I hemmed and hawed over this forEVER, and finally Erin told me I should just go with the Nike's.  Her logic was too much for me to resist when she said, "What if you meet the man of your dreams while you're running?"  I'm not kidding when I say that that is why I bought the Nike's.  I'm also not kidding when I say "What on earth was I thinking?" and "Was I really ever that lame?"

So I wore those Nike's running early mornings on the indoor track.  I was looking awesome but running was seriously about 10% as enjoyable in my new shoes as it had been in my old Saucony's or would have been in my new ones, had I bought them.

I ran and I ran.  And I consistently didn't meet the man of my dreams.  In fact, the only person I do remember meeting was President Bennion, the President of Ricks College, who ran laps the same time I did every day, and who I wasn't particularly interested in making a good impression on with my footwear.

So you could say that the story has a sad ending, but I did end up running a lot with friends at BYU, one of whom  was the man of my dreams.  I just wasn't wearing those shoes when I met him.  And he is the last person that would ever care about what I had on my feet.

And here I am 14 years later having done so little exercise that I still have ONLY those same Nike's as my shoes to be active in (although even when walking across town I just wear my every day shoes and in the summer I only wear sandals or flip flops).  They're pretty worn, but WOW.  And they're even less comfortable today than they were then, as my feet have "grown".  

I still think they look pretty awesome, though.  

I'm not a fan of pictures of old shoes, but I had an afterthought to include one anyway, so here it is.

You can tell it was an afterthought because I would never say "I... think they look... awesome" if I knew I'd be including a picture, but I'm leaving it anyway.   And sorry they're lar

ger than life.