My Strange Addiction

I have a problem.

There.  I said it.  That's supposed to be the first step toward recovery, isn't it?  I bought a new pair of shoes the other day and when I went to find them a home in my closet I found I was out of options.  My closet overfloweth.  A lot of ladies out there can relate, right?  Except in my case, instead of cute shoes in every color and heel height needed for every occasion like any normal red-blooded American woman, my closet is packed with old running shoes.  I am the Imelda Marcos of dirty old, worn out trainers.  Check it out.

What lurks in your closet?

It turns out I have accumulated no fewer than seven pairs of running shoes in various stages of decomposition.  (After I took this snap, I found yet another pair hiding in the breezeway covered in coagulated mud from some long-forgotten adventure.)

I'd like to say it's not my fault.  The conventional wisdom is that runners need to replace their shoes every 300-500 miles or tempt injury.  I've had shin splints and tendonitis.  I don't like either of them.  And, now that I've built my weekly mileage up to a solid 20 or so, that means at least two pairs of shoes a year.  Saucony and Asics are chuckling all the way to the bank.  But what do you do when your runners are retired from official duty?  I typically use my second oldest pair for rainy days or other questionable running conditions.  My third oldest pair gets further demoted to yard work and lawn-mowing.  But what do you do with numbers 4, 5, 6...?

There are a couple of re-use options.  Soles4Souls cleans up old sneaks and donates them to people in third-world countries.  But, I think it is fair to say that some of my treads are a little far gone for that effort.  Nike recycles old sneakers into other useful stuff like track surfaces, basketball court underlay, and tennis courts.  They have a collection bin in most of their stores.  But, alas, there are no Nike stores within a 50 mile radius of where I live and if you didn't notice from the photo, don't go shopping for Nike all that often.

The answer arrived this weekend in the form of our local high school's Earth Day recycling event.  They were collecting the un-collectable -- old electronics, and yes, you guessed it, sneakers!  Hooray!  So, along with an embarassingly large collection of dead laptops and cell phones, I packed up some of my oldest kicks and said good-bye.  Admittedly, I still kept four pairs, but I need them:  my primary trainers, the aforementioned sloppy weather trainers and yard beasts, and last but not least, I had to hold on to my trail runners 'cause every once in awhile they are nice to have and I do have a mud run coming up...  Baby steps, right? 

Hey, we are almost there.  Over $10,000 raised and just about 100 miles left between Mike and me to get to Denver.

Days 210-217, April 13-20
17 miles running, 62 miles riding
1335 miles completed, 65 left to go!!

And, at last check in Mike was down to 28 miles left to go.

We're Heeeeeeere!

Okay, not all the way the finish line yet, but Mike and I have both made it to Colorado!  With less than 150 miles and only 3 weeks left, we are both in the homestretch.  So get your checkbooks ready, folks, because we are both going to make it.  Even if, as Mike suggested, we have to run laps around the Sheraton.

I was looking at the map recently and noticed that a few miles back, near the metropolis of Haigler, Nebraska, our path took us within 1/2 a mile of the Kansas border.  So, I've upped the ante and decided that we need to add one more mile to our challenge so we can count Kansas as the 9th state in our journey and make it an even 1400 miles.  Hope that doesn't break the bank for any your pledges.  I know that 1399 number was bugging you anyway...

And speaking of pledges, we surpassed the $10,000 mark a few days ago, which is amazing, so thank you!  Those pennies make a difference.  You guys are awesome.

I'm buying a beer for the first person I see in Denver who can tell me all 9 states we've traveled through.  (Here's a hint: 3 of them are on the map in the picture.)

Here's my tally:
Days 207-208, April 10-11
15 miles biking and 6 miles running
1256 miles completed, 143 144 to go

and, at last check in Mike had survived the Grand Canyon and was up to 1288 miles.  Way to go Mike!

Because We Can

 

As a child of the '80's, and since I've been spending a lot of time thinking about music lately, I was excited to hear that Bon Jovi is making a comeback.  Okay, maybe excited is too strong a word.  More like curious -- in the way you are when you're sitting in a traffic jam and you know there's a car crash up ahead and you don't really want to look but you just have to, and then you do, and wish you hadn't. Maybe that's a little harsh on old JBJ and the boys, but seriously, they are a bunch of old dudes trying to make a rock comeback...

As luck would have it, I'm finding their new anthem, Because We Can, catchy enough to make it onto my running playlist.  The message is timely, too.

Home performance, as an industry is in a state of transition.  Programs are changing, and not always for the better.  Contractors are fighting the good fight but still struggling to figure out how it really works as a business.  Many states are challenged by public policy focused on short term resource acquisition in favor of creating sustainable markets for home performance.  It seems the post-ARRA hangover we all knew was coming has started a bit early.  Everything goes in cycles and after a wild ride up the curve this past decade or so, we seem to be experiencing what stock traders might characterize as a correction.

Some people I've talked to lately are worried.  I heard one person ask recently, "Has home performance reached its peak?" implying that maybe the success we've seen in the past is as good as it's going to get.  Others are just weary.  When you work hard every day only to be confounded by counter-intuitive public policies and program rules, even the most enthusiastic among us eventually grow disillusioned.  This all might drive some people to take their marbles and go home.

I see it differently.

Some of these "corrections" are just part of the normal cycle.  Those who can't remember the past are doomed to re-live it, right?  Home performance has grown large enough to draw attention to itself and with that comes scrutiny.  Victims of our own success. There are people in decision-making roles who haven't been engaged in the energy efficiency arena long enough to understand why we went all performance-based in the first place.  The new ideas coming out of local regulators and legislators are often not new at all. 
Deja vu.

There is something we can do about it, though.  We went out on the proverbial limb to launch this home performance thing a long time ago.  It was hard.  Nobody understood it.  We didn't even know if it would work.  But we made the commitment.  We didn't stick a toe in the water, we jumped in over our heads without a life-jacket and doggie-paddled for all we were worth.  We need to exercise that same strength of conviction now.  We need to be unafraid of the waves crashing over our heads and make use of the tools we have as a result of the past ten years of effort.  We aren't doggie-paddling anymore.  We've learned to swim and even got a few life-rafts floating out there.  (Yes, it's a tortured analogy, but it's my blog.)

We still have work to do.  The good news is we have an amazing foundation to build from.  We've built ourselves a common language around home performance.  Just about everyone in the energy efficiency world has some notion of what home performance is and that is significant.  Even more significantly, we are making headway in raising awareness outside of the EE industry, too.  We have a small but growing infrastructure and not just contractors.  All kinds of vendors are popping up offering all sorts of tools and services to help make delivering home performance easier, faster, smoother, better.  We are making connections in other market sectors and there are a some big ideas out there being set in motion that promise to be game-changers. 

Home performance may have reached a peak, but there are taller peaks to come.  We just need to keep on keepin' on.  And we will.  Because we can.

And speaking of keeping on, here's the tally:

Days 194-206, March 28-April 4
76 more miles logged
1235 miles completed, only 156 more miles to go!