A carload of people I knew from high school drove by me one night while I was running.  At 3 am.  They were coming back from a party I hadn’t been invited to.  I caught up to them at a stop sign, and they asked me why I was running at 3 am.

Because it was raining, I told them.

They asked where my shoes were . . .

I didn’t want to get them wet.

It seemed perfectly logical at the time.  I ran on the soft tar where I could, drizzled by DPW workers to cover cracks in the road.  I only made it a couple of miles.  My feet were covered in blood blisters afterward.  I had to wrap them in gauze and tape the next day for my morning run.

My feet wept through my shoes for days.