Gear Geek

The women in my running group laugh as I walk up to workouts with my arms laden: food, water, headgear (hat/glasses/hair ties). As a gear geek, I do carry a lot. Today, I felt a little ridiculous. Apart from the requisite clothing and shoes, I always run with a hat and sunglasses (while two of the three women I ran long with today go hatless, and none bother with sunglasses), plus a heart rate monitor, which adds both a watch and a strap to the mix. On top of that, today I bore a Fuel Belt laden with stuff: GPS unit, four bottles of fluid, two gels, a coin purse of Endurolytes, and my new talisman, the EpiPen. Stuff kept falling out. At least the EpiPen rattles as it hits the ground, and I didn’t care to try the banana-flavored Hammer Gel, but the detritus I left in my wake (and my three or so trips backward to retrieve the EpiPen) did seem a little silly, especially as one of my partners ran two hours on nothing but a few sips of sports drink when we passed her car.

Still, I made it home well fueled and feeling great, and when my neighbor asked how many miles I’d run, I was able to nonchalantly reply, “Oh, about sixteen.” Her double take was priceless.

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