Running For Office
Susan Rinkunas
There's a lot of news swirling around Republican vice presidential nominee and Alaska governor Sarah Palin. We're not here to talk about that (fear not, political trash talkers, our forumites are all over it). Nor will we discuss the fact that tonight in Minneapolis, she'll make history by becoming the first-ever female Republican veep nominee when she formally accepts the nomination of her party.
Rather, we're here to inform you that, according to a forthcoming profile in The Wall Street Journal Magazine, Palin is a runner. Not just a "oh, I go jogging once in a while" kind of runner, but a "I'll get my run in or else" kind of runner. The woman named her first born "Track" for Pete's sake, because he was born during track season. (I should suggest that a friend due in November name her baby-boy-to-be "Pigskin"). True, Runner's World's sales development director named her dog "Miles," but...it's a dog.
Palin's routine is to run 7 to 10 miles almost every day but she has been known to take time off, not during an election year, but during a pregnancy year (she's a mother of five). She returned to work three days after giving birth to her fifth child, Trig, in April (is her husband a math teacher?) and is now back to running three miles every other day.
Alaska sure sounds like an interesting place to train. The governor lives in Wasilla, about 45 miles north of Anchorage, which is known to record days with 19 hours of sunshine in June. This is good news for a busy working mom who's trying to squeeze in her workouts amid parenting and, you know, running the largest state in the country. Accordingly, Palin has run outside at midnight, sans headlamp, because she can. Personally, I'd trade the long summer days in favor of having temps above zero in the winter.
Frostbite-inducing weather notwithstanding, Alaska does have a rustic charm. Case in point: Palin runs past glaciers and fuels up on moose and caribou. And her strength training? Snowmobiling. "It's the best upper body workout you could ever have," she tells the WSJ. "You're maneuvering through hundreds of pounds of powder."
All of these things seem to be working since Palin has clocked a 10K in 49:01 and ran Humpy's Marathon in Anchorage in a very respectable 3:59:36. These races were both before she assumed the post of governor, but we certainly give her credit.
We're not saying you should vote for someone just because they run (although this could be our chance to lobby successfully for wood chip running lanes between sidewalks and roads). So in the interest of fairness, we would now like to invite Democratic veep nominee Joe Biden to give birth to eight children, name one "Fartlek," and run an ultra. Then we'll write about him.
For the record, Barack Obama is a runner and his father may be Kenyan, but the Illinois senator is a former [?] smoker and hasn't run any races that we can find. He did, however, attend a University of Oregon "twilight" track meet in May and tested his hurdling ability (it wasn't pretty). But he chose Biden over Alan Webb as his running mate. For shame.
To our knowledge, neither Biden nor John McCain are runners. Anyone here know otherwise? Or do you know more about Obama's running habits?
