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When Running Was Weird
Runners are different, or we try to think we are.
When I was growing up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, there was a friend of our family
who lived at the other end of the block with his wife and four children. His
name was Aaron Goldstein, and he built houses for a living; in fact, he built
our four-bedroom home on Rye Road, where I spent the first 15 years of my life.
Aaron passed away several years ago from a degenerative muscular disease, but
while I lived on Rye Road, I remember him primarily for one thing: He liked
to run.
Running wasn’t fashionable, faddish, or popular back then. A runner like Aaron
was considered odd, an eccentric who probably never knew how to operate an
automobile. I still have this mental picture of Aaron running through our neighborhood,
lean and wiry in his color-coordinated tracksuit. Aaron was different. He was
a runner. None of my other parents’ friends jogged; they golfed and played
tennis.
The Weirdness Gets Mainstream on Madison Avenue
More than 30 years later, the running boom continues its fat and happy trajectory
through all aspects of our post baby-boomer, health-conscious society. The sight
of a runner tooling through staid suburbia no longer invites puzzled stares but
approval and appreciation. Runners are not different. They are us. We are them.
Or we want to be them.
Nonetheless, the advertising folks at Adidas have turned the old-fashioned “runners
are different” concept on its waffle-bottomed head by playfully injecting into
this dusty mantra a twisted in-your-face creative message. Using the tag line
“Runners, yeah, we’re different,” the print ads feature runners in
their less than graceful moments.
One bare-chested male runner is taping up his nipples at a race start with a
confused elderly woman looking on; in another ad a female runner is shown using
a tree to hide behind to answer the call of nature while her female running
partner keeps a nervous lookout for two approaching male mountain bikers.
What Adidas is saying is that Adidas runners are different from Reebok runners,
Saucony runners, and Nike runners. Adidas runners are truly obsessed runners.
Other runners who use other brands are not a breed apart; they are like everyone
else. It’s probably a meaningless, hair-splitting distinction that is part of
the American business tug-of-war between publicly-traded companies vying for
market share domination.
Conformity in Uniformity
Aaron Goldstein was an original; he was different as he logged his 10 and 20-mile
runs through the leafy suburbs of Cleveland in the sixties. Today, runners are
forced to push the endurance envelope by entering ultra-marathon races such as
the Western States 100 to be different. I know several of these runners. I am
jealous of their fortitude, their discipline, their bodies’ ability to withstand
the pain and punishment.
It’s difficult to claim runners are sui generis when 100,000 runners show up
at a mass running event like the San Francisco Bay to Breakers. These runners
dress up in wacky costumes to peacock-parade their individuality, or difference.
There is conformity in their uniformity. The exception is the several dozen
nude runners who need no costumes to let the world know that they are indeed
cut from a different cloth (or lack of).
Running is a solo person’s pastime. Why we do it—that’s where the difference
exists. Not what kind of shoes we wear. Adidas isn’t exhorting
folks to exercise; that’s a given these days. They just want to own your
feet.
What I’d like to tell Adidas—and I’ve been wearing their shoes for years—is
“yeah, runners are different, but so are my feet...my right foot is a half-size
larger than my left.” See if they’d use that in a slogan.
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