Now. Now I am a runner.

I am going to go out on a pretty sturdy limb here and assume that most every runner out there at one time in their young running career hesitated to call themselves a "runner." I'm guilty of that. Someone will say, "Oh, you are a runner." No. No I am a person who runs. Big difference. For some reason I could never say "Yeah, I'm a runner." I felt like a phoney. I have only been doing this running thing since January, but in that time I've run a few races (including a half-marathon), subscribed to Runner's World, started a blog about running, gotten up at 4 am to run, and logged around 300 miles, and registered to run a full marathon. I have even started to like running WITHOUT my iPod. Yet, I still was hesitant to call myself a runner.

I also would guess that all those runners out there had that moment, that event, that one particular run that pushed them from the "person who runs" category, into the "runner" category. Maybe a 5k, their first long training run, overcoming exhaustion on a bad short run, something like that.

I dropped 120 clams on some new kicks this morning. I am a runner.


I was so giddy when I walked into the running store today. To the point that I was stupidly giddy. I walked in the door, the sales guy asked if he could help and I said (or maybe yelled), "I'm here for new shoes. Saucony, please." I even brought in my old shoes so that he could better assess that I had completely worn them out and that it was indeed, time for new shoes. He watched me walk and told me I had an extremely neutral foot. I tried on two pairs, ran around the parking lot in them (I was wearing a long skirt at the time - I'm sure I looked smooth), and let the guy do all kinds of feeling around the see where my toes were in the giant shoes. One very interesting thing that I learned today is that my left foot is a little bit longer than my right foot. These shoes are also a full size bigger than my old shoes. I always read to size-up for running shoes, but these seem huge. I could have saved $30 bucks and gotten a different pair, but the ones that I did get are rated for 100 more miles of wear than the other pair. And I have been waiting for these shoes for a while, so I went with the more expensive set. In blue.

I will take them for their first official run tomorrow morning. Because I am a runner.