Running Goes Greek – Are You Brave Enough to Pledge?

I was never in a sorority. I never rushed, I never felt the urge to. I’ve always found the whole thing a little scary actually; one of my best friends during high school went on to rush a fraternity…Kevin, yes I still remember the time you called me at 1am freezing, walking to a bus-stop in nothing but your boxers and totally lost somewhere in LA. How you retained your cellphone is still a mystery.

Yes, I’m probably being stereotypical, and one can venture to say they are not all bad…and maybe the girls are less cruel in their hazing. Though, I’m a girl and can attest that girls have their own breed of cruelness: destroy them mentally.

Mooooving (hey, okay, the cow fits now! Look at the pieces coming together!) past that though, I thought it might be fun to come up with our own running sorority/fraternity. We can make it a nice soro/frat (that will by my totally legit term here and I’m sure it’s what colleges everywhere use) because runners are a nice folk…

Rush:
* You want to join? Are you sure…okay, here goes. Strip down to your skivvies…just kidding. Trust me they aren’t skivvies but yes, these shorts are meant to be that short. Girls do race in glorified underwear though, but trust me they are more comfortable than you think. Boys, try not to blind us with your shorts tans.
* Take off the Converse and fit yourself in a REAL pair of shoes. Ones with advanced cushioning systems, arch support, cozy toe boxes. If you’re into fashion girls, don’t choose solely based on color patterns…sometimes running shoes are ugly, but you wear them anyways.
* A bit of math. If you ask how many laps around a track to a mile, you may be turned down off the bat. Get comfortable with the metric system until 5k’s and 10k’s equate to 3.1 and 5.2 miles respectively in a nanosecond.
* Dorkdom lingo. Learn fartlek, add it into conversations on a regular basis. Know the difference between motion control, stability, and neutral fitting…learn to recognize a pronator, supinator, and neutral foot type. In fact this should be a question to ask on a first day: “What is your foot type?” (just kidding on that last one.)

Hazing:
* I said runners were nice, and it’s true, all of the hazing is done to yourself by yourself. You will know you’re in the right direction when you’ve waken up in the middle of the night after a run/workout and had trouble getting out of bed as you normally would just to go to the bathroom. At that point you know the morning will be a rough one.
* Always know you will lie to yourself. You have to in order to get in the full number of repeats that the workout calls for.
* You may baft. You’ll certainly curse (at least in your head), you might feel a little woozy (wobbly leg syndrome), you may experience some tunnel-vision down the home stretch, you will continually wonder why you are doing this. But if you push through it and finish the answer will be clear to you.

Mixers:
* Workouts with teammates, run dates (umm, what’s sexier than two runners getting sweaty together?), group runs, and the trump card: races.
* Some rules here: be legit and honest when lining up according to the pace you CAN run. If you’re not going to be dropping say, 5 minute miles, and instead maybe 9 minute miles…that’s totally cool but don’t line up at the front of the line and block the actual 5 minute peeps.
* If you’re a guy of the soro/frat and you’re in a race and a girl is passing you…have the balls (yes, I said that) to let her pass. If you try to block her, box her in, elbow her, or any of the like…you are in fact LOSING some of your manhood and are treading grounds for being evicted.
* Hang and chill…like I said, runners are cool folks. The best ones are fierce and competitive when the gun goes off and will race to push themselves to their best…BUT after the finish line (and before the gun goes off) they are friendly, respectful, and did I say cool to be around?

Perks:
* If those aren’t obvious by now, you must go back to the Rush stage and repeat until the answer is clear. If you’re a runner, you know you’re a runner.

1) Were you ever part of the whole Greek thing?

2) Would you like to join this Running Soro/Frat? (I’m starting to coin the phrase: Obsessive Compulsive Runner and toying with adding it more distinctly into the blog theme/name. Heck, maybe I’ll copyright it…lol. Regardless, we could be the OCR’s.)

3) Anything you’d like to add as parameters to any of the steps above?