songs of experience

I feel I need to defend myself in this post. It seems I received my first official comment about an erstwhile blog on “one-dimensional fitness freaks.” I responded directly to Besty in the comment thread below, but let me explain further in this upper room. My rancor over self-obsessed runners stems from an encounter I had with a DAD - a father of 7 children - who was out with us on the second of his two, week-end long runs as he was preparing for yet another ultra-marathon. I could not believe that a man with 7 young children at home with his wife/(slave?) would indulge himself so shamelessy on BOTH Saturday and Sunday, running all morning - and probably napping all afternoon - with no guilt or awareness of his familial responsibility. He arrogantly justified this addiction as “healthy” or “heroic” or whatEVER … when I saw it as, simply, abusive. Fuming after hearing this guy’s story, my training partner (a fellow mom, I might add) and I simultaneously decided to pick up the pace to drop this loser. We ran so fast in the last two miles that Mr. Megalomaniac, “ultra-man” was only able to speak in one-word utterances. We were chatting away about our children and our lives as moms as we ran faster and faster and faster while he could only grunt, “I, me, my …”