Chips 'n Dips

I ran race number five for 2008 Friday. It was the Celebration 5k in honor of the Declaration of Independence. I showed my patriotism by training Wednesday and Thursday then running the race Friday. My legs are sore, my feet hurt, and I need some new shoes. However, JG and EG were nice enough to by me my own Champions chip. It’s a chip that tracks when I start a race and when I finish a race. The races rent them to runners that don’t have their own for $2, and since I’m cheap (I didn’t want to drop the money on a chip…) and I’m lazy (…because I’m not running enough races for it to be cost effective). My chip was delivered in the envelope pictured above. The G’s are two of the nicest people in the world so they were most likely just being generous, but they could have been embarrassed being associated with someone who drops his rented chip into the bait bucket with the rest of the part-timers and cheapskates. It’s like having dinner at The Russian Tea Room and someone in your party ordering Busch in a can while the rest of the party is enjoying Dom Perignon. I even called JG a half hour before the race to ask her if my chip was supposed to come with a Velcro strap to fasten to my shoe – how gauche? JG, with no hint of condescension, explained that I should thread my shoe laces through the chip. I had the chip on roughly 30 minutes – the time it took me to finish the race – before I was looking down my nose at the riffraff taking off their rented chips. Just because I’m cheap doesn’t mean I’m not a snob. I live in Riverside (not Avondale). I attend am a member of St. John’s Cathedral. I have an office in the Modis building. And I have my own Champions chip.