Fix It Yourself
Krayton Kerns
8.27.08
Last week I entered my family in Oregon’s Hood to Coast relay race. Teams of twelve runners pay top dollar to load into two minivans and run the 197 mile course from the timberline level of Mount Hood Oregon to the beachfront town of Seaside. Twelve thousand runners gave it a try August 22nd.
This was the third time my trophy wife and I have done this race, but this is the first time we dragged our family to this crown-jewel of relay races. My kids, nieces, nephews, and son-in-law are used to chasing cows through the timber so at least they arrived physically conditioned. They found running much easier once they swapped their boots, spurs and chinks for tennis shoes and spandex. Compared to the beautifully tanned and surgically sculptured runners from the coastal states, it only took one glimpse at our farmer’s tans and rancher’s legs for everyone to know we were foreigners.
Nineteen hours into the event and around three in the morning, my nephew Taylor grabbed the baton and charged off into the darkness of the Clatsop State Forest for leg 21. Taylor is a seventeen year-old high school sprinter but he is accustomed to short races rather than endurance events. New longer distances bring forth new longer problems and around mile13Taylor developed the infamous marathoner’s “chub-rub”.
This painful injury occurs due to the repetitive back and forth rubbing of your sweat-soaked inner thighs. You don’t have to be chubby to get this affliction and Taylor definitely isn’t fat. You could boil him a long, long time and still not make much of a soup. This injury can usually be prevented by either wearing friction-protecting spandex or coating rub spots with a generous layer of “Body Glide”. (“Body Glide” is sold only in running stores because that is the ten-dollar way of selling fifty-cent Vaseline…which is actually just a penny’s worth of petroleum jelly. If the left succeeds in halting crude oil exploration and converts the US to wind energy what are you suppose to do with a “chub-rub”, blow on it?)
Taylor was wearing spandex under his gym shorts but they were either too big or twisted and the pain of each stride became excruciating. Being a self-reliant ranch kid unaccustomed to relying on government solutions to all of life’s problems, Taylor went to plan “B”. He clicked off his headlamp, wadded his reflector vest into a tight ball and sprinted off the course into the seclusion of the dark timber to tear off his spandex. There before the curious eyes of the spotted owls danced a white-butted Wyoming cowboy changing his shorts.
Once the bunched-up spandex tights were gone the pain disappeared so Taylor put his gym shorts and reflector vest back on, clicked on his headlamp and returned to the course. With the resources he had available he solved his problem and finished the task at hand. And that brings me to my point about self-reliance.
There are politicians that claim Americans are incapable of providing for themselves. Since this is an election year expect to hear great promises of generous gifts from the state and federal treasuries because promoters of this philosophy maintain their power by redistributing tax dollars from people who work to those who don’t. They do this under the illusion of being compassionate, but there is nothing compassionate about committing someone to a life of government dependency. If you value your freedom be self-reliant and do as Taylor did, fix your problem yourself.
