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‘Leave the Running to Us,’ Is What His Shoes Kept Saying

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I was out for a morning jog when I remembered that I might be late for an appointment.

I pulled up alongside another jogger.

“Got the time?” I asked.

“ET or ETA?” he asked back.

“Whaa?” I rejoined.

“You want my elapsed time or estimated time of arrival back at my point of origin?”

“How about just the regular time of day,” I said.

“In Zurich, Leningrad or Sausalito?”

“Right here. I just need to know the time of day, right here, now.”

“Standard time or military time?”

I noticed that he was glancing down at his left shoe as he ran. It dawned on me that he was wearing a pair of those new running shoes with the built-in computer.

Obviously, this was a runner who stays abreast of new technology. He was wearing a polypropylene mesh top to keep cool and Lycra tights to keep warm. He was also wearing a headband, wrist bands and leg warmers. He was carrying those jogger’s hand weights.

“I was thinking about getting me some of those hand weights but I wasn’t sure if I’d like ‘em,” I said. “That’s why I’m carrying these two soup cans.”

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“Thank goodness,” he said. “I thought you had just robbed a market.”

“Say,” I said, “I notice you’ve got a pair of those new computer shoes. Like ‘em?”

“Like ‘em? Pal, these shoes have brought me out of the dark ages of running.”

“Yes, I noticed the little headlights,” I said.

“These shoes have elevated running to a new spiritual level,” he went on, his eyes misting over with emotion. “Check ‘em out. At the touch a button, I can have a readout of my pace, my speed in miles-per-hour, the distance I’ve run.

“Also, they tell me how many calories I’m expending, my cholesterol level, blood hemoglobin level, carbohydrate level, air ozone level, current EKG reading and Dow Jones averages.”

“Slick,” I said. “What are all the colored lights for?”

“The yellow ones are turn signals, the red are emergency road flashers, the blue is a blister warning light and the purple is a doggie-doo warning light, which is hooked to a radar sensor.”

“Wow,” I said, “those babies do everything but tell you when your shoelaces . . . “

“Your shoelace is untied,” said a computer voice in his shoe.

“Excuse me,” the guy said, stopping to tie the lace.

His shoes seemed to be doing a lot of beeping. I asked him about that.

“If I’m overstriding, they beep fast. If I’m understriding they beep slow. If I’m striding just right, they beep out the tune to Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run.’ ”

He noticed I was plodding along in my old high-top canvas basketball sneakers.

“Interesting shoe,” he said. “What does it do?”

“It keeps nails and bottle caps from sticking in the bottoms of my feet,” I said.

“Nice feature,” he said.

“Listen, I’m curious,” I said. “Why do you need a shoe to do all these things for you? After all, Paavo Nurmi and Jim Ryun didn’t have computers in their shoes.”

“And you notice they’re no longer running,” he said smugly. “These shoes maximize my efficiency. Along with everything else, they save me a lot of time. They log all my running data. I assume you keep a log.”

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“By my fireplace, sure,” I said.

“No, a daily log of your running.”

“What for?” I said. “Unless I happen to run into Smokey Robinson and the Miracles when I’m out jogging, there’s seldom anything really worth remembering or logging. Why do I need to keep track of my m.p.h. or total miles?”

“Know thyself,” he said.

“Wasn’t it Plutarch who said that?” I mused.

“No, my shoes said that,” he said. “They are programmed to deliver an inspirational quote every minute. The point that quote so clearly drives home is that the window to a man’s soul is his running log. In this case, my shoe computer.”

“I see,” I said. “By the way, I notice you don’t wear a personal stereo.”

“When I run, pal, I don’t want anything to come between me and nature,” he said.

Just then, as he was bending over to check the readout of his pulse rate in his shoe, he crashed head-on into a pine tree.

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