NEW SHOES MAKE YOU RUN FASTER

There is a musical called 110 In The Shade and that must have been the temperature under a eucalypt in Sydney by 8am this morning.  It was ridiculous.  My American husband nearly gave back his visa and quit, and my marathon training effort seemed stunted before breakfast.  Under ordinary circumstances I don’t mind the heat, but there was no way I could run in it.

I sweated through the day, spending most of it in the kitchen with Gregory who was preparing a feast for my brother returning to Norway tomorrow.  I was garde manger (which is a fancy French word for salad cook) and helped assemble a fabulous array of Aussie delicacies impossible to find in that faraway land.  Things like lamb, fresh vegetables and non-government regulated alcohol.  I diced the tomatoes, picked the basil, ground the cumin seeds and right around onion chopping time, Sydney showed her style, and the heaving clouds rumbled in and doused the steaming land, giving me no alternative but to rip off my apron, get on my shoes and get out in it. 

New shoes today, (well, second hand, but still new to me).  They were mum’s castoffs, having decided the arch was too high and it upset her angle on the step machine.  (She is not a runner, but gets right into the NRG classes at her ladies only gym). 

I always run better the first time I take out a new pair of shoes.  My step is light, my pace is high, my form impressive.  At least that’s how it appears to me.  Perhaps I’m buoyed by the new rubber cushioning, or maybe by how fancy I imagine I look, but the key to marathon success could in fact be new shoes.

I ran like lightning…I felt like I ran like lightning.  But appearances count.  If I look the part maybe I can delude myself into thinking I am the part and suddenly my marathon imaginations seem just that little bit more real…