Shanzhai Lu

photo: CC // Aaronth

Back in early December 2009, I was trying to come up with a new year's resolution I could stick to. I wanted it to be life changing yet free of drastic measures that would set me up for failure after a few weeks.

Examples of certain fail:

Going to the gym everyday.
Becoming vegetarian.
Starving myself into size 2 jeans.
Give up gummy bears.

On December 12th I noticed tweets from Chef Roy Yamaguchi in Hawaii. He was walking the Honolulu Marathon and tweeting pictures and updates during the marathon. A bunch of us had met him the month before during [re]think: Hawaii and were cheering him on throughout the day via Twitter. 

That's it. I felt inspired and decided on my new year's resolution for 2010. I was going to give myself an entire year to finish my first marathon.

First of all, let me start off by saying I am not a runner. Before this year, the last time I did any serious running was in high school. The longest I could last on a treadmill at the gym was 15 minutes. I hated running. Part of me felt like I was setting myself up for a new years resolution failure again. So I took up a pretty vain approach with this resolution. To the extent that running is good for you and it burns calories, I figured training for a marathon would also help me lose weight and get back in shape throughout the year. In other words:

My resolution in 2010 is to finish my first marathon or become a skinny bitch trying. :)

So what's the first thing I do after deciding I'm going to take up running? Why, hit up a running store of course. In January, I walked into a New Balance store and somehow walked out with almost $500 worth of stuff to go with a diagnosis that I had an "overpronation" problem -- from the guy who sold me motion control stability shoes with orthotics.

See that video above? Part of my Google research when I got home that day. Because who needs to ask a real podiatrist when you have Google right? Great I thought to myself. I overpronate. Whatever it is, it was made to sound like a bad thing. Something I needed special expensive running shoes for to correct.

My "motion control stability" shoes felt clunky. The first few days, I walked around with them to get used to it. Put it this way, think shoes with a roll bar to keep your foot from pronating during your run. Because pronating is a bad thing. Oh but wait, there's more. I was also upsold special orthotics. Things to insert into my motion control shoes. Because not only did I have an overpronation problem, I had a severe case of it. So the shoes were about $160. The orthotics another $40. So I spent $200 on my feet alone. The other $300 from impulse purchases of clothing so as to look cute while overpronating I guess. Anyways, hindsight being 20/20 all the elements of buyer's remorse were evident in that trip to the New Balance store.

My first few runs sucked. I couldn't get past 2 miles without wanting to quit. I figured most of it was a combination of being lazy and getting used to running again. So I kept trying. I thought the shoes and orthotic inserts would help me get into running. They did manage to guilt me into giving it a try for a few weeks. I mean, I spent so much money on them, I had to try.

Truth be told, I hated the shoes. They felt heavy and clunky. They were uncomfortable. The whole experience of running in them sucked big time. I was doomed to fail.

To be continued...