Mid-Life Crisis
My friend drives a beautiful car. People look at it when he drives by, and they look at him when he gets out of it. He told me women check him out and I didn’t believe him. He’s a 7 on a good day, a Southern California 5. When I met him for coffee on my purple bike that nobody looks at, he pulled up in his car in front of the coffee shop, and everyone on the front patio, and even some of the people inside turned their heads to see who was getting out of the beautiful car. I was happy to see him get out of the car, but I’m not sure anyone else was.
I like to play a game called Guess Who’s Driving the Corvette. It’s an easy game, and it’s fun to play a game I always win. When I see a Corvette pull up somewhere, I’ll say something like: silver hair, gold chain, tucked-in pastel shirt, jean shorts, loafers without socks. I’m usually right. Except for the loafers, sometimes it’s Hokas with calf-length white tube socks.
You don’t see super attractive young people get out of beautiful cars. I don’t mean to insult half the people reading this, or at least a quarter of it if my friend with the nice car is still reading, but I’m going somewhere with this.
There has to be a name for the phenomenon of complicating simple things. Running is possibly the simplest, purest sport. The required gear starts and ends with footwear. It’s refreshing because my other hobbies are already too complicated. In climbing, there is an endless stream of technical equipment and specialized gear. When you get into rescue, it’s exponentially more technical to the point where it seems like half of the people on our team are some variety of engineer. Even surfing gets complicated, and not just with board dimensions. I’m talking swell models, and knowing which angle, period, and swell size benefits your favorite break. I’ll wake up in the dark to read buoy readings off the coast, and then decide whether or not the extra sleep is worth it. It usually is.
But for running, we need a pair of shoes. How complex can it get? If you join me on an average Thursday night group run, you’ll hear talk of stack height, heel to toe drop, toebox width, tight ankle collars, anti-untie laces, lug millimeters, something called superfoam, the dreaded 0-drop, and the latest technological marketing buzzword — the Carbon-Fiber-Plate.
Most of these features are overengineered for a runner of my level. In the same way a Ferrari is overengineered for driving from the suburbs to the beach in heavy traffic. I’m not a car guy, but I guess I’m a shoe guy, maybe a fetishist, but not the high-heel kind, the 6-mm drop with some superfoam kind of fetishist. And there is still that urge to spend money on something that I wouldn’t have 20 or 30 years ago. So I fed the lust.
These aren’t regular running shoes. These are shoes that are guaranteed to make you faster. The technology is far beyond what I need for my twice weekly slowish 3-5 mile trail runs.
These shoes cost what three pairs of my shoes cost when I was a faster runner. They’re light, they’re beautiful, and they have a carbon plate that recoils and springs back with every shuffle of my feet. They are my midlife crisis car, and I love them. I couldn’t afford them when they would have actually made a difference for me, but I get it now. I get why owning that Corvette and consistently driving 10 miles under the speed limit at all times is appealing.
No young women are checking out my shoes. My wife saw them and asked me why I spilled paint all over them. I’m fine with this. But the guys at Thursday night run club are going to love them.
Thanks for reading. Substack does a subscription thing, and I’ve subscribed to other writers, but I think the “buy me a coffee” model works better for me because I have issues with commitment. A few people clicked the button last week, and it meant a lot to me. It motivates me to continue to write. It’s not much, but it feels amazing to get paid to write something. — Dax