If man were meant to run, God would have given us shoes for feet.

The annual Indy 500 Mini Marathon was run today, and I had friends participating in it — both runners and ham operators who helped with course communications — and something occurred to me that made me laugh.

You’ve probably all seen the cartoon of the two guys running away from the bear, one in good shape and running like hell, the other one behind him rotund and puffing away…and being overtaken by the bear.  The caption generally reads something like, “I don’t have to run faster than the bear, I just have to run faster than you.”

And there are all these smug, self-satisfied X-gens and Millenials* who go out and run the course and put those annoying “26.2” and “13.1” ovals on the backs of their cars, as if to prove to the world that they actually could run to work and to the store but they choose to be lazy and drive like the rest of us.

It seems to me that, once we dropped down from the trees and migrated out of Hell, er, Africa, and developed civilization and gunpowder and standoff-distance arms and the automobile — or even just the goddamn spur — there was no more fucking need to run.  Stand your fucking ground, kill or be killed.  Retreat in good order while covering your rear with the standoff weapons.  Do route marches in training to make you tough (and because you might have to march to the objective and march back).

But bottom line, the guy who ran from Marathon to Athens to deliver a fucking message and then dropped dead on the spot — there was a goddamn idiot.  Was he running to request reinforcements, or more arrows, or some important military need?  No, the dumb shit was running to tell the Athenians that they’d won the battle.  Hell’s jingling bells!  He could have WALKED.  He could have JOGGED.  He could have ridden a damn horse or a donkey.  But no, he fucking RAN, because he had the biggest scoop in years.  (I’m actually surprised he isn’t the patron saint of war reporters.)

To me, running a marathon in this day and age is ridiculous.  If you have to run from it, you should have been armed and you should have fucking killed it.  Thus I think this is a much more appropriate oval automobile sticker (although you may and no doubt will quibble about your particular favorite calibre):

I don’t have to run faster than the bear.  I just have to have the correct calibre for him.  (Which would probably be .45-70, if I were bear hunting.  Which I don’t do.  I like living.)

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* Why the fuck is there no spell-checker anywhere on the Internet that accepts “millenials” as a correctly-spelled word?  I smell conspiracy.