Sun Ra mentioned his distaste for running, so I felt it was my duty as an ex-runner to step up and vehemently agree with him. Now, most of my running was done during junior high and high school, but the mania has gripped me from time to time since then, for one reason or another.

First off, hell yes runners are scrawny little things. I certainly was. If you’re thin and have a fast metabolism to begin with, running turns you into a tiny, sinewy little husk of a man. In hindsight, I should’ve been eating a hell of a lot of cake or something to compensate. Huge slabs of beef to bulk up my colon, maybe.

Frankly, if our colons are so inefficient that they retain scraps of beef for years, that seems like a pretty big failure of evolution. We’re omnivores, with sharp teeth and everything, so you’d think our guts would have figured out how to process muscle tissue without saving bits for later. Plant matter is more difficult to digest, so you’d think our colons would be filled with mats of vegetables; intestinal peat bogs, if you will.

Beef: So good, your colon doesn’t want to let go!

As I was saying before you distracted me with that tangent, running does little for you other than to make you look unhealthy. While on forced runs in jr. high, I’d often think to myself that soon I would never have to run again, and that in the future, I’d look back and smile with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be slapping across asphalt and trying to drag myself across the finish line in a reasonably non-embarrassing amount of time.

And then I went and took cross country and track in high school. Oh, it’s not that I sought it out. It’s just that the alternatives were:

• Tennis Since I wasn’t already an excellent player, I’d be bouncing a ball off of a board for the year while the good players mocked me.

• General phys. ed. Meaning “all those sports I suck at.” Yes, that pretty much includes every sport known to man.

So running it was. Unlike Sun Ra, I’m merely of average height, and was of below-average build, so running was a potentially useful skill.(1)

But damn, running is murder on leg joints. Sure, when you’re a spry high schooler, in good health because you’re young and not destroying your body with alcohol and drugs because you’re not going to the good parties, you can shrug it off. But then, when you get older, and forget that running is utter crap, and take it up again, by, for example, running two to three miles on your first go in years, it takes its toll. I’ve never had side stitches, like Sun Ra, but the knees and ankles take one hell of a beating. The fact that I weigh 20-odd pounds more than I did in high school could also be a factor.(2)

On the other hand, I have never suffered from bloody nipples because of running. Maybe Ra has a lucky canvas sack that he wears while running, or has particularly delicate nipples. Perhaps some protective tape, or those things that strippers wear. With the tassels. Or else just invest in some sandpaper and build up some strong, marathoner-worthy calluses.

1. Later, that was replaced by “befriending and hanging around with people significantly larger than me,” which conferred the same avoiding an ass-kicking benefit.

2. And was, in fact, what prompted the thought, “Hey, why not start running again?” Fortunately, merely walking and eating less seems to have a similar, and much less painful, effect.

Columns by Harlock