Blurry-eyed and barefooted.
As a group of mother runners there tends to be many early morning running forays. This works very well to make sure we can get home to shower before the kids wake up and the morning goes into hyper-drive...making breakfast and lunches, getting dressed (ourselves) getting littles dressed (finding socks, turning pants right-side-out AND forward), finding this thing and that.
Timing-wise the early morning run is the WAY TO GO! However, in the wee hours of the morning most of us are not as awake as we’d like to be: I personally am usually in a half-conscious state where, if my fellow runners were not waiting on me, I’d jump right back in bed and be fast asleep before my head hit the pillow.
It is in these wee hours that the odd things happen…those moments where we are, oh so stealthy, trying to get out of the house without waking our spouse OR (blimey!) the little ones. And for some reason the odd things that happen often involve shoes.
I left my righty.
Unless you are a barefoot runner your shoes are a pretty necessary part of your running accoutrement. It seems to be that the combo of the sneaky home exit and the need for shoes creates a bizarre circumstance for shoe related troubles.
One of our runner friends once showed up with two left shoes. She even got as far as putting them on and trying to run, because, though she knew something was off…it was way too early for her sleepy brain to figure out what EXACTLY was wrong.
Color Counts.
Once, in an effort to quickly recover from plantar fasciitis I purchased a pair of stiff, super supportive florescent orange shoes. I didn’t walk, I clomped. Waking up blurry eyed one morning and realizing I was running late I was speedily grabbing my running things while keeping an ear tuned to my kid’s rooms and I plucked what I thought were my running shoes from the basket. Once I arrived at the meeting point I realized I brought the clompers…I only made it a mile and a half on those babies.
When all else fails, get coffee with friends.
It’s important to note that shoe issues don’t always work out badly. One early morning, a fellow mother runner in our group found that while she had socks to cover her feet, that was it. She had completely forgotten her running shoes. Fortunately, this occurred on a morning many of the group were between races so they ditched the run completely in favor of joining our shoe-less runner for coffee and gossip.
Much power to the barefoot runners out there…ya’ll have streamlined your morning and can NEVER forget your shoes!