Thrīv

Six weeks ago I received an e-mail from a gentleman who was working for thrīv Natural Performance Wear and he of course loved my blog and wanted to give me a free thrīv workout shirt that I could write about. Not one to turn down free things I graciously accepted. After all, the motto that I live by is ‘if it’s free, it’s for me!’

According to their promotional materials, thrīv performance clothing “is made from eco-friendly bamboo and cotton, so it’s far more natural and lightweight than synthetic polyesters. This unique fabric blend wicks sweat better than Under Armour, and it also has a higher SPF. It doesn’t hold in odors, and it’s extraordinarily soft.” Making things out of bamboo is the in thing to do. We own bamboo sheets and my wife has a bamboo case for her iPhone which just proves how in touch we are.

As promised, the shirt was ridiculously soft and very lightweight. In fact, it was so soft that I didn’t even put Band-Aids on my nipples because I actually wanted them to rub up against the material as my chiseled man-pecs flopped around. I took the shirt out for a quick 3 mile test run and was pleasantly surprised to find that not only were both nipples intact when I arrived back home but they were also a little aroused which leads me to wonder when thrīv is going to start making bamboo performance underwear. Oh come on, you were thinking it too.

The major downside to the thrīv workout shirt is that it looks exactly like a T-shirt so I was forced to tell everyone that I ran past that it was a bamboo performance shirt lest they think I was some rookie runner out running in a plain cotton T-shirt. Other than that slight downfall, the shirt works great. I did notice that by the end of my run the shirt was sticking to the gorge between my sweaty man-pecs, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for that on future runs.

The only other negative thing that I can think to say about the shirt is that I’m getting a little tired of companies misspelling words, or spelling them phonetically. “Hey, let’s drop the e and put a macron over the i so that it’s still pronounced like thrive.” You know what this kind of irresponsible behavior leads to? It leads to people sending me texts that use ‘ur’ in place of ‘your’ or ‘prolly’ in place of ‘probably’ and it annoys the crap out of me. Guess wut? Ur prolly failing English 101. (Blegh, I feel dirty just typing that.) Yeah, I’m the guy who sends texts that use correct punctuation and uppercase letters to start sentences because dag nab it, proper punctuation is worth the extra 3 seconds that it costs me to type it! And quite frankly, I don’t want to be the kind of person who uses those cutesy shortcut words because once you start doing that you’re only one step away from being the guy that forwards e-mails chock-full of hamsters giving each other flowers with the subject line ‘jus 2 make u smile’. You make me sick!

Anyway, huge thanks go out to thrīv (which I’m pronouncing like shiv because it makes me want to drive one into my temple) for sending me the shirt. After this post it’s destined to be the last thing that they’re ever going to send me unless we count bad vibes or the cease and desist letter that their lawyer just started hastily typing upon reading this. The shirt rocks, even if it does look like a T-shirt.

I Need This Shirt

I couldn’t have been prouder of Candis for finishing her first Triathlon. On our way home from the Tri we had the following conversation:

Me: You did awesome today!
Candis: Thanks.
Me: Seriously, I think it’s really cool that you’re a triathlete now.
Candis: Really, why?
Me: Because I’ve never slept with a triathlete before.

Then Candis found this shirt on CaféPress and I must have it.

Speaking of shirts, I’ve been toying around with some sites similar to CaféPress and have been thinking about designing some Half-Fast running shirts with slogans on the back like “Behind every good runner... there’s you!” I’ll have more on that in the future, but feel free to suggest race shirt slogans that you’d like to see.

That’s all I have for now, but be sure to check out my post today over at Complete Running, Kristina said it was “best thing you’ve written that I’ve read”... of course, Kristina also does this, so I’m not sure that she’s all there.

Niketown: A Model of Efficiency

For my wife’s birthday I recently bought her, among other things, a nice cold weather running shirt from Niketown. Unfortunately I bought it a size too small and ended up having to return it. Incidentally men, if you’re ever in doubt about which size to buy for the woman in your life, go with the smaller option. It’s much safer. “Really honey? You don’t wear a Petite? Well, you look petite to me.” This will earn you more brownie points than the actual purchase and will partially make up for saying that running on a treadmill is worse than giving birth. You know... if you were stupid enough to say something like that.

Allow me to state for the record that I love Nike. I’ve never bought a pair of their running shoes, but I probably own or have owned everything else they’ve ever made, including a lovely running skirt. So it gives me no joy to have to write a negative post about Niketown, which I sincerely wish was an actual town. It would be a town without fast food chains, the streets would be paved with that rubbery track compound and Gatorade would flow from your faucets.

Back to the story. I walked in to Niketown, the store not the imaginary place in my head, and I moseyed on over to the customer service desk. I explained my situation to the kindly old lady who looked eerily like my late Grandma, while she scanned the small shirt and checked my receipt. I was about to turn and walk off to grab the new shirt when Grandma informed me that someone else would get it and bring it to me. Perfect. That would save me from seeing something else on my way and exchanging my wife’s new shirt for that jacket I’ve been eyeing.

I stood to the side and waited. The women’s running shirts were located on the 2nd floor, which is a U-shaped floor that is open to the 1st floor below in what would be the middle of the U. This allowed me to actually see the rack where my wife’s shirt was residing. After waiting for a few minutes I turned to Grandma and told her that I remembered where the shirt was located, and would she like me to go and get it. No. Someone was already getting it. It occurred to me that perhaps someone was bringing one from the supply room instead of getting it off the rack. I figured that this would be a good thing as I often hear women say that they’d rather not wear things “off the rack.”

After some more waiting, Grandma asked me if anyone had brought the new shirt down yet. She asked me. I looked around at the empty counter and then sarcastically at my empty hands before answering in the negative. Grandma spoke into her walkie talkie and a new employee hurriedly came out of the Women’s Running department and down to the counter where I was patiently waiting. The employee looked at the shirt I had returned, frowned and then headed back upstairs where she began searching the racks for the shirt. After some flustered searching she found the shirt I had been awaiting, pulled it off the rack - sorry honey, the shirt is “off the rack” : ( - and then did something very curious. She walked past the stairs, over to the other side of the store and put the shirt into a giant glass tube that was apparently some kind of “merchandise elevator.” Seconds later the shirt disappeared into the ground and showed up in the giant glass tube that was 30 feet from the counter that I was waiting at. Nifty huh? Except that Grandma was now helping other customers and didn’t notice that the new shirt had been beamed down.

More waiting and then Grandma excused herself from the customer she was working with and spoke into her walkie talkie again. I could only make out her side of the conversation. “Are you bringing that shirt down?” - “Oh… but I’ve got A TON of other customers I’m helping, I was hoping that you could bring it to the register.” (Apparently, in Niketown the store, 2 customers equals A TON.)

The second employee emerged again from the Women’s Running department with a less than pleasant look on her face. She hurried down the stairs, went to the merchandise elevator, pulled out the shirt – the shirt that she had put in there only moments ago – and brought it to the counter. Before I could even thank her she dropped the shirt on the counter and then WENT BACK UPSTAIRS. At this point it had taken 20+ minutes for the new shirt to arrive at the counter. It would have taken me less than 30 seconds to go upstairs and grab it myself, but Niketown in their efforts to put the customer first decided to save me the hassle. Thanks Niketown. I actually think they just like using those cool merchandise elevators, I know I would if I were a Niketown employee, but alas I’m entirely too efficient to work there.

When I got the shirt back home and gave it to my wife, she removed it from the bag and out fell a 20% off coupon attached to the new receipt. Do you know when the 20% off coupon expired? Two hours from the time of issuance. Bravo Niketown, Bravo.

Put Your Shirt Back On!

I have this idea in my head that all my readers are young attractive women who swoon at my sagacious prose and wish they could find a man like me, in which case this post is falling on deaf ears. Or blind eyes, or something that makes sense. (See that. Sagacious prose right there). If, on the other hand you're an old, overweight, hairy guy who enjoys running with his shirt off and reading this blog then this advice is for you. Put your shirt back on! Nobody wants to see that. I think it's great that you're aware of the fact that you need to lose a few pounds and you're doing something about it. I agree that you'll look better with a nice tan AFTER you lose the weight, but please lose the weight first. It's not like people will notice that you've got a nice tan and ignore all the extra weight and hair.

On a side note I'd like to offer a big thank you to the old, hairy, runner who was ahead of me on the trail last night during my run. It was because I no longer cared for the view that I sped up and turned in a better run than I normally would have. Ironically, I had recently been laughing at KdoubleA and his misfortune dealing with this exact scenario, so maybe it was karma that I would also have to suffer through it. Sure hope not, because I was laughing pretty hard at those idiots on their treadmills too, but I’ll let you know next time I step on mine.

Official Times and Splits

Well the official times and splits were finally posted to the Bolder Boulder website. My official time was 56:00, when I checked my watch at the finish it said 56:01, but we’ll go with their time. Here are the splits:
Mile 1 8:34
Mile 2 9:07
Mile 3 9:15
Mile 4 9:07
Mile 5 8:55
Mile 6 9:20
Last 0.2 1:42 - Not posted. I used my deductive reasoning skills (read: calculator) to get this split.

After I finished, I saw a sign that read "Can't wait for your splits, text your bib number to 94827 and we'll send them to you." Editors Note, the number has been changed to protect the incompetent. So I text my bib number and get a text message back after a couple of minutes that reads "Thx [sic] 4 participating. U [sic] will receive ur [sic] splits when u [sic] finish the 2007 BolderBOULDER." What? I didn't really finish? I gave some serious thought to jumping the railing and crossing the finish mat again. By the way I’m still awaiting that text with my splits. Let’s hold our breath shall we.

Later we headed over to the post race expo where I found out that they were not able to print out our results just yet. Shocking, I know. All was not a loss though because I did buy the awesome ‘Sea Level is for Sissies’ T-shirt that you see in the picture. The folks from the Denver Marathon were handing out registration forms and encouraging people to sign up for the Denver Marathon on October 14th. Gee, let me think. I’m pretty beat right now after 6 miles do I like the idea that I’d still have another 20 miles left to run? Nope, sure don't. Whoever came up with this marketing strategy should be shot. Speaking of poor marketing decisions feast your eyes on this disaster from 1984.

We gots da' Shizzle!

For those of you that aren't hip enough to understand the title of this post I'm trying to tell you that we got the shirt in the mail yesterday. If you don't know what shirt I'm talking about then you haven't been reading this blog regularly and you're surely not going to start after seeing the awful title at the top of this post.

Every now and then I like to pretend that I'm 'down' with the younger crowd, but I'm a 31 year old white guy who just tried to drop the word 'shizzle' in his blog. If that doesn’t scream geek then I don’t know what does. In fact, if I tried any harder I'd be an ESPN TV personality, so please don't encourage this behavior by leaving me any comments.

On a running note (imagine that on a running blog), I'm beginning to taper my running in preparation for the Bolder Boulder and probably won't get in any more long runs. Two weeks might be a little far out to taper for a 10K but I've struggled on my long runs lately and have had some minor knee pain that I'm leery of.

Here's my running schedule for the next two weeks:
Today: 8 total miles including 6 tempo miles.
Thu 5/17: 5 miles easy
Sat 5/19: 3 miles easy (may bump this up to 4 or 5)

Mon 5/21: 5 total miles including 3 tempo miles
Wed 5/23: 3 miles easy
Thu 5/24: 3 miles easy

UPDATE: Here's a picture of my better half modeling the shirt (click to enlarge)

We have a Winner!

Updating a previous post in which I had asked for your votes on which running shirt to have made up for my wheezing, asthmatic wife who is running in her first road race (the Bolder Boulder Memorial Day 10k), I am pleased to announce that we have a winner, and also a runaway sentence that just won’t quit. Also, since I don’t want to sleep on the couch tonight, I should mention that my wife never “wheezes” on runs any more and rarely even needs her inhaler. Take that Asthma!

Here’s the breakdown of your votes from the comments:
* Kiss my Asthma! 3 votes
* You’re Losing to an Asthmatic! 2 votes
* Blow me, I’ve got Asthma! 1 vote
There was one write in vote each for fo’ Sheezy I’m Wheezy and Asthma is Sexy!

Voting was Chicago style so if you or your late grandfather voted multiple times, they were all counted. Also of note, my better half liked the “Kiss my Asthma!” idea so in reality that one had 4 votes and none of the other votes mattered one iota but it sure is nice that the votes matched the pre-determined outcome. I guess it’s kind of like an Olympic figure skating contest in that regard.

The image that you see here is the graphic that we sent to Running Banana superimposed on the shirt, it is purple to match her running skirt. I know several people mentioned that they wanted one, so if you’d like a high-res copy of the image let me know and I’ll e-mail it to you so that you can order your very own from Running Banana. Actual pictures of the shirt will be posted when it arrives.

Olympic figure skating? Running skirts and color-coordinated matching outfits? I need to stop now. Expect a more testosterone filled, manly post tomorrow.