Nu Shooz*

I don't know the exact date that I took up running, but it was about a year ago. My wife and I had just quit smoking (her for good; me, limpingly), and she suggested we inch our way into running a 5k. The 5k in question was the Y ME breast cancer awareness run. Being the preparedness junky that she is (and, not incoincedentally, an ex-girl scout), she sussed out an excellent resource for ex-smokers who want to start running, the Couch to 5k program. And it's not just for ex-smokers, it's for anyone who's currently on a couch, which, in our country, is a much larger quorum.

Anyhow, we got fitted for shoes. The Couch to 5k program says you should have some good ones, and the knock offs at the Target shoe section don't qualify. You need a light shoe, and one that has room for your foot to spread, and one that can breathe. There're other criteria, but I was still a newbie, and could absorb only so much expert information.

At the suggestion of the running store guy -- a runner himself, lean and owlish at the same time, and not altogether comfortable with people -- I bought a pair of Asics Gel 2120. I ran em up and down outside the store. It was late winter in Chicago, and I remember dodging mounds of sidewalk ice. I taking deep frigid breaths (still a novelty for newly clear lungs). Felt good, so far as I knew. The Asics sure as hell beat my Target specials.

So I ran my first 5k, and then ran two more last year. I don't have an odometer but figure I've put about 250 miles of training and on those Asics. Lots of road grease. Lots of treadmill rubber.

This Christmas, using a generous gift card from my Pa, I raided the shelves of the local Sports Authority and came up with another deeply discounted pair of Asics. Turns out the Gel 2130 line is shouldering out the old guard -- among which my shoes belong -- and they were mostly giving them away to make room on the shelfs.

So all this is to say, Happy New Year. Look at the wear and tear on 07's pair, look at how gray and frayed. They're a touch collapsed. Compare with the 08 model, which is blindingly white, plump and healthy. I can't tell you that I have a necessarily rosy outlook for the year, or that I'm constructing a bulwark of resolutions to make then one by one fail at. But let's just say that if I can make those shiny new 08's look even a little like the 07's, we can consider it a small-scale victory for will power, optimism, and the absence of the much-mourned Camel Lights hard pack.

*80's hippie-pop band, known in certain circles -- mostly my circles -- for their top forty hit, "I Can't Wait."