As I, along with countless others, up the ante this month in preperation for another season of endurance sports I thought back to when I was 10. My family lived in an RV park full of snowbirds for the winter and Oregon for the summer. I hated it because I had to switch schools. I now envy my 10 year old self because of the constant summer weather I was living in.
At said RV park, there was a real wacko that lived amongst us. He stayed to himself and rarely socialized with others. I only saw him participating in two activities. One of which was running (for some crazy reason) around the RV park constantly checking his watch. I could not comprehend why anyone would want to run like that, let alone on the the dirt roads because the surface was so much softer than concrete (how annoying!). The other activity I saw him partake in was the eating of bananas. I covertly followed him back to his trailer atleast a dozen times to see if in fact he was crazy. I actually thought he might have been an undercover spy or something because he didn’t seem to work or anything, just workout. The guy must have been 60 but was built like James Bond. I figured he had to have a good reason to work out so hard. Unfortunately my spying led me to only one revelation, he ate bananas after every work out. My dad thought he was a nut job as well as the rest of the people that spent their winters in the RV park.
Flash forward to 2009. On a wonderful 74 degree late winter day in West Virginia, an endurance athlete churns out mile repeats in a cemetery next to his house on a perfect dirt surface, easing the pounding on the joints. After each split, he checks his watch. The locals walking their dogs in the cemetery give strange looks to the man running at a quick clip with nothing on but a pair of Adidas Bostons and some short shorts. What a wack job they must be thinking. After the workout, the runner goes back to his house and heads right for the fruit rack where he grabs not one, but two bananas. This is when I thought to myself and chuckled outloud, “I am now the banana man”.