Run And Tell That

Runners have always been a strange breed to me. Back in high school, I was buddies with a guy named Joey Norcio. Joe was an all-around good guy: smart (in the IB program), funny (had a very sarcastic, subversive sense of humor), and a lights-out shooter on the basketball court…except our high school freshman team had a thousand guards, which unfortunately never allowed him to get consistent playing time. Joey’s 1 strike against him: he ran cross country.

I don’t want to get into a whole running is not a sport thing. I have respect for runners as athletes, and I actually think running (and track and field in general) is underrated as a spectator sport as well. I fully endorse it as part of any athlete’s training program, but I used to despise running during soccer or basketball practice, and I equally hated it at the gym as an adult.

Ok, now that's just uncalled for.

At some point, I actually started to enjoy running though…your lungs filling up with air, the burning in your legs, the little rush of endorphins or whatever that you would get when you were finished…now that I have confined myself to the stationary bike for cardio training to rest my constantly ailing knees, ankles, and achilles, I actually miss the treadmill.

But even so, I always felt it takes an odd person to run just for the sake of running. To hear runners talk about things like heart rate zones, cadence, and how many miles they ran the other night is enough to make me want to induce my own vomiting. And you could make a perfectly legitimate argument that anyone that is into weightlifting or bodybuilding in a similarly serious way is just as nutty. In truth, tracking your diet down to every individual calorie or gram of protein or mapping out your entire training regimen weeks in advance is just as geeky as what any runner does…and yet there’s something about runners – maybe it’s the kind of holier than thou, running is gospel attitude a lot of them have – that makes them more off-putting...

...or maybe it has to do with the fact that they look like the hipster doofuses of the sports world.

Either way, I maintain that there’s got to be something in a runner’s genetic makeup that makes them different from non-runners. As a means to improve yourself as an athlete overall, I think running is great, but to be someone’s thing in and of itself is just weird to me. It was a point that wasn’t lost on Joey Norcio, as we would often tell him that there was just something “off” about runners…to which he would only smile and acceptingly nod. What could he do? The rest of us weren’t runners. He knew we couldn’t possibly understand.