Against the Wind, Pt. 1; Or, Why I Began This Dumb Blog

Hello, visitor. Welcome to the Belfry. Make yourself comfortable, because I’d like to tell you a story. It happened a week or so ago, while sputtering around a gonad-meltingly hot Boulder in my car. My now-ex-girflriend and I were idling at the stoplight in my car at Folsom and Valmont when a tanned guy wearing New Balances, a mesh hat, a heart rate monitor, a fuel belt, an iPod, and a microfiber t-shirt jogged across the crosswalk, passing in front of the windshield. He was going extremely slow. I had to resist the urge to tap the accelerator and cut his workout unexpectedly short.

There are billions of this guy across Boulder, south suburban Denver where I grew up, and other predominantly white, upper-middle class, Dharma and Greg-loving communities throughout the (sub)urban United States. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why  guys like him irritate me so much, and when I tried to make a stab at it as I sat fuming in the car, Sarah looked at me like I’d been tipping back a fourth of Wild Turkey before getting in the car. After mulling the matter over further, I’m going to attempt to explain why the running/triathlon industry has effectively, and perhaps unknowingly or even unwilling, spat in the face of the wolf-smile-crazy, liberating koan that was previously American distance running. I’m, of course, talking about the running boom, set off and spurred vigorously on by Frank Shorter and Steve Prefontaine, that swept America with a waffle-soled vengeance in the seventies and eighties.

Two caveats: I know that this is largely an exercise in waddling gleefully about in the sallow mud of hypocrisy. I myself have purchased breathable, mesh-paneled running shorts at REI costing more than the GDP of Sub-Saharan African nations. To mention nothing of the small fortune my father and I have effectively poured into the coffers of Clif Bar, Inc. (the peanut butter ones are the best.)
Also: I am all too aware that this sort of nostalgia-freighted philosophizing is overly simplistic and reductive in its machinations–my glimmering, dustily pastoral landscape of tight, polyester t-shirts, knee socks with chartreuse racing stripes, handlebar moustaches, and Miller Lite is largely one of my own fashioning. And yet its redolent scent in my nostrils cannot be whisked away. And the inner Keatsian in me is proud to believe that the spectres of the imagination cannot be pulled free from any objective reality, for what we dream does, in some fashion, become truth.

So hop into my crusty old time machine. I want to talk about Stallone first.

One of my favorite scenes in Rocky IV is that strange, dual-narrative training montage. It switches between shots of Stallone in self-imposed exile somewhere in the woolly armpit of Siberia, fulfilling the American dream of Protestant self-improvement as he works his body into a sinewy boxing beast in the snowy wastes. As you probably remember, this narrative is interwoven with shots of Ivan Drago, Rocky’s Soviet nemesis, a superhuman killing machine that’s almost seven feet tall, takes shots of anabolic steroids, trains with the help of biofeedback machines probably left over from the set of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, and who pulverizes Apollo Creed straight into an anticlimactic death during the film’s opening salvo (pun intended). The climax of the montage is when Rocky finishes climbing a huge snowy peak and screams “DRAGO!!!!” out acrost the icy expanse as the camera quickly zooms out into the clouds. The allegory is a gorgeous piece of Cold War propaganda: Russians are unfeeling, cold, scientific, conniving, cheating boobs, while Americans are self-reliant, wilderness-conquering, scrappy, lovable, not-aging-particularly-well underdogs.

The irony that I’m attempting to exploit here is that I feel that the running industry has effectively tapped *both* sides of the Drago/Rocky equation. This may sound like insanity, but hear me out.

As a long-time peruser, if not outright reader, of Runner’s World, Outside, and other health-and-outdoor-focused magazines, one thing that has always struck me is the staggering amount of plastic shit that is apparently necessary for you to enjoy oneself the second you leave the door to increase your cardiovascular fitness: GPS fitness monitors, $250 sunglasses, anti-nipple chafing creme, little fleshy band-aid things that pry open one’s nostrils, neoprene running shoes with computer chips in them.

Here’s the thing. Human beings, like other animals, probably at one point were excellent runners, hikers, climbers, and stream-forgers, given our hunter-gatherer background. I have a hard time imagining a Neanderthal’s back giving out in the middle of a hunt because he didn’t have trekking poles to support his lumbar region. This is the Drago rearing his ugly, vodka-soaked, albino head. Now, I’m no neo-Luddite; I have been known to respond to the sweet call of cool, breathable technological crap. I have nocturnal emissions over the prospect of an iPhone price cut. But running, to my personal curmudgeonly tastes, has always carved out a subversive position in the organizing narratives of capitalism. All you really need to run, really, is a halfway decent pair of shoes, a road, and a pair of uncomfortably short shorts with built-in underwear. Good shoes–the only really critical equipment for us oily North Americans raised in the lap of luxury–can be bought (usually no more than twice or three times a year, depending on mileage) on sale for less than sixty or seventy bucks. Shorts cost way less than that and can be worn multiple days in a row between launderings. As my father has been quick to point out for as long as I can remember, grody, sweaty running shorts also double as underwear and sleepwear.

There is something unabashedly revolutionary in running (as I imagine it once existed, perhaps foolishly) in just how cheap it is as a form of masochistic entertainment. Almost every other sport or hobby–especially equipment-intense pastimes like golf, marmot bow-hunting, squash, and paintball–requires a significant financial investment in its operation, and a specific locale in which to enjoy it. To say nothing of cycling. The fact that people have been sufficiently duped (and this is why my readings of Runners World and Outside have always been a little skeptical, given the page space dedicated to orgiastic gear reviews) into the oppressive axiom that Running Requires Stuff is tremendously saddening.

Nowhere is this malady more pronounced and melancholic than in those Life is Good shirts, tote bags, shorts, climbing pants, salad shooters, beer coozies, and road flares that they sell at REI. My friend Will once described their boho-appropriating logo as a “cervix wearing a beret,” which I think hits the nail squarely on the head.

These products have always struck me as being nothing less than as ridiculous and superfluous as what I imagine to be lying wrinkled in the bottom of Pauly Shore’s hamper. A consumer purchases a Life is Good shirt with the sunny intention of proclaiming a certain laid-backness, easy-goingness, and mid-thirties hipness to the world. However, these shirts (and yes, I’ve seen my fair share of them on other runners along the Boulder Creek Path) instead broadcast a kind of paranoiac desperation; an infantile will to unfounded optimism, and piecemeal denial of the ghastly problems facing the world-at-large. They remind me of Youth Group at the Presbyterian church I attended growing up, which is way off the chart on the Creepy Scale. Enough about Rwandan genocide, let’s talk some more about how great peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are! This buying into the euphoric benefits of the Outdoor Life, represents the same cultural appropriation of once-pure running ethos I mentioned above. Life is indeed good, especially if one enjoys the unique freedoms and populist mysticism of a late evening run through a deserted golf course while its sprinklers are on. However, to imply that Life is only Good if certain microwicking fibers are coating your slick, pilates-at-7:30-working-for-wells-fargo-branch-manager-chocolate martinis-with-the-girls-on-Friday-nights-yellow-lab-named-Vanessa-owning body, or other scientific necessities are jangling amongst your shoelaces, is to deny the simple beauty of the running gait. And to make running even ghost-whiter than it already is.

On the Rocky side of things, we fare slightly better, but more on that sometime in distant future, where I will tackle the arduously intellectual fodder of:
-Joggers with calf implants
-The beer tent at the end of races being taken over by microbrewed beer and what this glumly portends
-The vehemently passive-aggressive chumminess of Races in general
-Running and beer in general