Running: Still Crazy

I was reading a running magazine sometime last June when an adcaught my attention.

Bold letters across the top of the page read, "Still crazy after all these years." Underneath the heading was a pair of bright yellow shoes which looked like it had been taken from a cast member of the movie Cocoon.

Even worse than the color was the fact that seatbelt-like fasteners had taken the place of shoelaces.

"How awful," I thought. "Someone grabbed these hideous yellow slippers from a poor old man's feet just for an ad in a running magazine!"

But--being the wise consumer that I am--I read the rest of the page and learned that these slippers were in fact the latest in running shoe technology.

They were called, appropriately enough, the Sock Racer (although I wondered who would wear yellow socks), and would become, the shoe company claimed, the newest phase of the running shoe revolution.

The ad made me think about all the changes that have swept through the running shoe industry during the past 15 years.

I can remember back to the early 1970s when my dad came home one day carrying a pair of red shoes with a white swoosh on the side. Nothing unusual there, I thought.

"But look at the bottom," my dad said. "It looks like a waffle!"

As legend has it, these crazy red and white "waffle-soled" shoes were invented by University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman. The story goes that he melted some rubber on his wife's waffle iron, and thus gave birth to the waffle shoe--and subsequently to the huge running craze of the 70's.

Soon, everyone was waffling around in Bowerman's brainchild, and--as more people picked up running--more flavors of waffles appeared.

About two years later, my dad came home with another new pair of shoes. These also had waffles, only this time they were blue with a yellow swoosh and he called them his "boat shoes."

Indeed, with eight-inch-wide soles, he could have carried 40 or 50 passengers on each foot.

In the years that followed, my dad and I witnessed the arrival of big waffles, little waffles, air-filled soles, shoes with extra arch support, shoes with no support whatsoever, and every other conceivable form of footwear.

But what's the significance of all this craziness--are such complicated shoes really necessary for running?

My high school cross country coach used to tell the story of a girl he coached who lost a shoe in a mud puddle at the state cross country meet, and still finished ninth.

The latest shoeless wonder is Briton Zola Budd, who sprints along, setting records wearing nothing but her bare peds.

In July, I ran the San Francisco Marathon; after the race, the talk centered on the women's division winner. "Did you see those yellow slippers she was wearing?" someone asked.

So a few weeks ago, while training for this month's New York Marathon, I took a break and went to a running shoe store to check out a pair of the new yellow Sock Racer.

"There are only about 12 pair in the city," the salesman told me. "They're highly experimental," he added, as if the Army was considering equipping its men with yellow running shoes.

"How long will they last?" I asked him.

"Maybe ten races," he said.

Impressed by the salesman's presentation, I bought a pair.

I went home that night and showed my dad my purchase. "Look, Dad. It's just like wearing slippers!"

It was then that I realized that from the waffle sole to the air sole to the slipper sole, Paul Simon's words still hold true: running is still crazy after all these years.