We all know the story of the princess and the pea. A woman sleeps on a mattress with a pea under it and claims she’s uncomfortable… and no matter how many mattresses they stack on top of the pea, she just can’t get comfortable.
This proves her high-maintenance and the validity of her claim as a princess.
There’s a slightly less well-known story called The Runner and The Roc.k. It’s about a guy who feels like there’s a rock in his shoe… but despite best efforts, can’t figure out what it is that makes the ball of his foot feel like a giant boulder is grinding into his foot. This was the story of my run in Clearwater, Florida, this morning. My left foot hurt every footfall from mile 6 to the end. A smarter person might have stopped but runners aren’t always very smart; we’re much more stubborn and think we can just “run through the pain.” Because, ya know, even on the best of days, 26.2 miles is a bit painful. The moral of this fable is that a runner’s high maintenance and refusal to consider, oh, I don’t know, dropping out or pulling off to the side to check one more time on a phantom rock in the shoe, proves the validity of a claim to being a jackass.
Hee-haw. Hee-haw!
***
Amidst the snowy cyclone bombs hitting the northeast, Florida was set to experience the coldest day in a decade-plus. I wasn’t too worried — I’ve run in colder temperatures and in worst conditions. I mean, it was going to be 37 degrees at the start — chilly for standing around waiting to start, but not too bad once you get a moving.
There were however, a few curveballs. The race route had us crossing three or four bridges each loop that would leave us exposed to blustery winds buffeting our every move up and down the bridge. And thanks to the two-loop construct, we’d be buffeted twice as much.
But the bigger potential curveball was the frozen iguana forecast:
To be perfectly frank, I was disappointed we didn’t see a single frozen iguana. I had visions of the Ten Commandments Biblical plagues… or at least the falling frogs sequence from PT Anderson’s Magnolia:
Alas, it was just a two loop of hobbling pain in the foot. I ran with a nice guy from Manchester, NH, for the first 16 miles or so but while my Achilles’s Heel was my runner and the rock tale, his Achilles’s Heel proved to be, well, his Achilles’s Heel. As it was, I didn’t take too many snapshots — I was chilled with the winds and just trying to focus on ways to bend my toes and foot to minimize the rocky-feelings.
Spoiler Alert: Never found a comfortable footfall. What can I say? I’m a royal pain as an ass.
Hee-haw! Hee-haw!