Watch. Us. Run.

Watch us run

No one ever pegs me for a runner.

I’m neither tall nor fast. My short stature is more penguin-like than cheetah-like. More tortoise than hare.

But run I must. 

Another thing no one tells you about running is how addicted to statistics we might become.

It might surprise you. 

Just as a very well-meaning loved one might surprise you one Christmas (or birthday) by plunking down a half a week's pay for a watch that lassos itself to satellites and provides a compounding list of moments for you to collect and compare. 

It will fold your best time into your best pace and sprinkle in information about the range of elevation and the weather conditions. It may even tell you who in the neighborhood ran the course faster, anything is possible.

It may seem too big and clunky for your wrist, but soon you will feel naked without it. A slave to its lusty numbers. You will love it’s impracticality if only because it brands you as a person who runs.

On rest days you will scroll down memory lane, and discover the ebb and flow of fractions of seconds over the past months curious if not positively maddening.

You may even vow to give up the technology for short stints, hoping to

reclaim your initial love affair with

simplicity.

 But it has turned you into a different person ...

Like maybe you’ll finally be able to follow baseball because to do so requires an encyclopedic knowledge of every play ever made since 1791, when baseball was first mentioned in the US after Pittsfield, Mass. banned the game from being played within 80 yards of its town meeting house. 

Anything is possible now that you are able to keep Jesse Owens’ 100-yard personal best (9.4 seconds) in your brainpan next to Joan Benoit’s record marathon time of 2:22:21, which, incidentally, she held for 18 years until Deena Kastor beat it in 2006.

It’s not as if you are competing against the elite track and field stars. You are battling against your own best 5K time and maybe a secret rival you pick out of the crowd on race day. 

You are lucky to break 35 minutes.

You don’t know why you do it, but you can’t help yourself. Breaking a half hour would be huge, especially now that you’ve bumped up to the next age group.

These personal records are numbers that might be searchable online, but won’t be entered into Wikipedia by a third party anytime soon. 

No, these are numbers only you will use, mostly to plug into your computer’s password fields so you might gain access to the World Wide Web and stalk other racers you know. 

Inspiration, after all, is just floating around in cyberspace waiting to be -ogled.

I don’t know ... you might find yourself searching the race results of friends and family, and maybe even the rankings of their dogs who race in what you ordinarily would have thought of as silly-named events called “Fast CAT.”

Who knows? You may even discover your sister’s Pembroke Welsh Corgi last year ranked 12th nationwide in her division with a top speed of 19.21 miles per hour.

Short legs and all.

You might also discover that your sister had no idea her short-legged, no-tail dog had attained such an athletic achievement.

But as a runner, inevitably you may wonder if anyone makes a watch a corgi would wear?

And if they can deliver by Christmas.