Shoes that make you go `Eeeeewww'

Last week I went to my son's cross country practice and then I went running around the park. The grass was quite soggy from a recent rain so my shoes got pretty wet. Anyway, the next day after I got home from taking him to school, I took off the shoes and put them on the little carpet by the door. A few minutes later I'm like: What is that smell? Seriously, it smells like cat piss.

So I figured maybe a cat was outside or something. But the smell didn't go away. I picked up the shoes and took a good whiff. YIKES!!!! They stunk big time. At first, I thought maybe one of the cats at my house had peed on them. But I hadn't left my shoes anywhere they could have got to at the time. Then I thought maybe I had run through some dog pee at the park. But that didn't make sense. It definitely smelled like cat piss, not dog piss -- and yes, there is a difference.

So I washed the shoe uppers by hand with detergent. That didn't help much. Then I sprayed them with Febreeze. That helped a little. But still, they stink. What happened? I would have had to run through a swamp full of cat piss to make them smell that bad.

On a hunch, I Googled "New Balance" and "Cat urine." Eureka! Turns out lots of people with stinky New Balance shoes have been blaming their cats for pissing on them. Turns out it's some kind of synthetic material in the shoe's midsole that stinks.

Not a newbie

Just in case you think I'm new to this running thing. I'm not one of those new converts. I ran cross-country in high school (we were city champs) and continued running regularly through most of my late teens and 20s. It wasn't until my 30s that I started slacking off and doing other sports like hockey and baseball and soccer.

Believe it or not, I was inspired to start running back when I was about 13 or so. I had just seen the movie "Rocky" -- yes the first one -- and I wanted to run just like Rocky. Except for punching the big slabs of meat. I wasn't into that. The scene that really struck me was the one where he cracked a bunch of raw eggs into a glass and then drank it. I can't remember if he did it before he ran or afterwards. Whatever. So out I went for a run, and when I got home, I got a glass and cracked about three eggs into it. Then I drank them. The first egg went down OK but I really had to choke down the last two. It was gross but I managed to drink the whole glass. Then I got a stomach ache and threw up. Raw eggs are baaaaaaaad.

Confessions of a couch potato

Funny how things sneak up on you. A while back I realized that I had stopped exercising regularly. I'm not sure exactly when that happened but I guess I've just been so preoccupied with being a mom and all the stuff that goes with it. I just kind of let it go. Anyway, a few years went by and I started finding it hard to get rid of those extra pounds. Also, I was getting depressed and finding it hard to shake that as well. And (yes, there's more) my joints were starting to ache, like I was getting arthritis, which unfortunately runs in my family. Yikes. I'm only ... um ... how old am I now? Oh yeah, I'm 45, right.

So I've started running two or three times a week. At first, I wasn't really running much. I would shuffle for about a minute or two, then wheeze, then gasp, then cry, then walk for a few minutes, then repeat the whole cycle all over. But eventually I got to the point where I could do it without crying or gasping, and then I got past the wheezing, and finally I did a whole 20 minutes of running without having to stop and walk. Hooray!