The Shoe Solution

I'm in the ride-and-tweak phase of the pump track buildout, which roughly translates into riding up to just the verge of puking your guts out, which is roughly 3 laps, and then moving dirt until you recover. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Thing is, the dirt-moving part is harsh business . . . squishing around in mud, balancing atop rocks and roots, stomping on shovels, that type of thing. So you gotta wear work-like shoes. And it's an absolute marital necessity to take them off when you tromp into your newly remodeled basement bathroom to pee off the beer you drank while you were digging.

And you also don't exactly wanna wear those same inertial mud-bombs when you're ready to swing a leg over and go postal on your track.  You want your feet to be fast like a cat!

The search for a solution takes us back to Mister Rogers.

I am not in any way kidding when I tell you that I totally admire and respect the man.  He was a super high-quality-character individual both in terms of his personal and professional life.  On the air, he taught kids all kinds of great shit about how to treat other people right, along with some other things, which left lifelong impressions, but which might have taken some of us a few decades to figure out how to apply to our own lives.  In my case, a certain lightbulb finally lit: "Change shoes when you change jobs".

So that was the first part of the grand solution and then the second part is the concept of slip-ons. I've never been that guy, but all of a sudden, apparently, I am.  And surprisingly proud of it.



Hardcore work slip-ons.  They've never seen the inside of the new bathroom.  Nor will they ever, lest I die. Quite violently.



Badass new riding shoes.  Think 'fast like a cat'.

Clap on, clap off.  Not quite, but almost like that.

The color coordination is not by accident.  I powered hard through the valley mall on my lunch hour in order to make it back in time for a 1:00 meeting.  I hardly ever go there because of their totally stupid parking lot arrangement, so I could totally not believe how many shoes and shoe shops were under that roof.  I'm fine on how I dealt with the pressure.