Runner's Heights: Teddy the Prophet

Cumulative mileage: 101 miles...it's over a century and more to come.

People have different reasons to keep a tally of their mileage -- perhaps, my only reason to keep a tally is to find out how many I have put on these New Balance 766 shoes. Well, that's not entirely true, because, on weekends, I run in a different pair of shoes since I am running on a different surface -- concrete. During the week, I mostly run on asphalt, which, I gather, is much softer than concrete. So, for concrete surfaces, I use a shoe that has more cushioning, such as the New Balance 804, and for asphalt, I use a shoe with more stability and pronation control, such as, the 766. As, I have mentioned before, New Balance is my preferred running shoe because they have extra wide versions of most of their running shoes and they have endeavoured to keep some of the manufacturing facilities inshore.

Now for religious fundamentalism 101 -- for all those who romanticize about utopian life in a religion-oriented environment, the events in Sudan might serve as a reminder about the unfettered intrusiveness of religious zealotry and fundamentalism in our society. Religion is fine and, perhaps, essential, in the realm of an individual, but when you band it together with a collective group of like-minded people, you usually end up with arbitrary tribalism, irrationalism, and unmitigated bigotry. A visiting teacher called a vote on what to name a teddy bear and the students voted to call it "Muhammad." So, now the teacher has been labelled an infidel for defiling Muhammad's name and the mullahs of Sudan have come out of their lonely lives and thrust themselves into the nation's limelight. The rabble rousers are having a field day with the hoi polloi while the rest of the world is wondering how and when "Muhammad" became a word with such vicious connotations, inciting the prospect of violence, hatred, and strife at its very utterance. Now, the stage is all set for a duel between the teddy-bear-hugging protesters outside the Sudanese embassy in London versus the knife-wielding, blood-thirsting fundamentalists protesters, in Khartoum. Are we all rooting for the triumph of the teddy over tyrannical fundamentalism?