We are unfaithful. As we head out of the running store with new loves on our feet, our old paramours are already relegated to the box under our arm. We are sailors on shore leave, seduced by stability, mesmerized by motion control. And so we look down at our faithful friends – as comfortable as an old, well, you know – and promptly unlace our way into a trial separation. I just want to see other shoes, you say. It doesn’t mean we’re over. And we’re not. ‘Cause now we’ll wear you when we mow the lawn. Pull you out for the muddiest of trail runs. You were Picasso and we want you to paint the house. So you end up on a darkened shelf until one day the door opens and two faded yet familiar beauties are placed beside you. You’ll never believe what happened to us, they say. Yes we would, you answer. Yes we would.
Rosie and Barry and Frank
Frank Shorter, the 1972 Olympic marathon gold medalist, may never have met Rosie Ruiz and Barry Bonds. But, sadly, he knows the type. When Shorter won in Munich in ‘72, he was preceded into the stadium by an Ruiz-like impostor, a high school student who jumped onto the track and entered the stadium to a roar from the crowd. Shorter never saw the young man and had no concern about his own win, but was admittedly puzzled when the crowd was silent as the American ran onto the track for his final meters. Much more troublesome was the impostor who stole the roar from Shorter at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. Waldemar Cierpinski, an East German, took the gold medal (Shorter won the silver) and followed up with another gold in the 1980 Olympics. But before there was a BALCO and a Barry Bonds, there was the East German athletics system now known to have supplied performance enhancing drugs to thousands of their best athletes. And evidence strongly suggests Cierpinski was one of them. So, once more, Shorter entered a stadium in silence. But, to his credit, he is philosophical about the twin experiences. He claims it helped him understand what he was running for: Not the attention or acclaim, but for something both deeper and higher. Something never attained by the two who preceded him – literally, but never figuratively – into the arena.
