Picture Me Running ... Without Pants

Ostensibly, the purpose of this post is to debut the cover of my upcoming book – but it also happens to be a nice little story about the importance of being prepared.

About three years ago in December, my friend Mike and I were approached to write an article about starting an exercise program for a magazine supplement to the Monterey Herald that would be published the following January. “New Year, New You” – that sort of thing.

Shortly after submitting our article, the editor asked if she could send a photographer to take pictures of us that would accompany the article. Since the two of us are accustomed to our head shots occupying a meager 1” x 1” square above our column each week, we were obviously flattered by this request. The editor told us the photographer would be in touch to set up a time and location for the shoot.

Several days went by without hearing from the photographer, we burned a few more days exchanging phone messages suggesting various meeting points, and our first target date ended up being a last-minute cancellation. All the while, the deadline for publication was drawing closer, and we were running out of opportunities to get the shoot done.

So it probably shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did when I got a call from Mike at work one morning that went something like this: The photographer needs to meet with us at Toro Park this afternoon. It’s the only day he can do it before the deadline, and you’ll have to come straight over from work so we have enough daylight left to take the pictures. It didn’t sound like much of a crisis until I remembered one thing: I didn’t have any running clothes in my car.

Fortunately, my car is something of a locker room on wheels, so on my way to the photo shoot I was able to scrounge a pair of beat-up athletic shoes, an old t-shirt, and a sweaty vest that was tucked behind the passenger seat because I forgot to bring it in the house after a 2-hour run from a few mornings ago. The final piece of the puzzle was my Speedo jammers that could pass as a pair of compression shorts – and with that, I managed to look something like a runner. Even though I felt like a complete moron.

The photographer turned out to be awesome, the photo shoot played out quite well in the fading light, and the pictures ultimately turned out much better than we expected. One of them was used on the cover of the magazine, and a couple more accompanied our article inside. Several people made comments to us about the cover photo, but no one specifically teased me about wearing a swim suit for a running photo. The moment came and went, and I figured that was the last I had to be embarrassed about it.

And then we went and wrote a book.

In the three years that have passed since that photo shoot, Mike and I really haven’t been photographed together for any promotional purposes; needless to say, being running columnists for a small-town newspaper doesn’t exactly make us Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. So when we started to consider a photo for the cover of our book, and remembered that we already had a series of high-res images of us running together that were taken by a professional photographer, Mike figured that was a slam-dunk choice to use. As you can imagine, I wasn’t quite as sure.

However, without any convenient or financially feasible alternative, I didn’t have any grounds for rebuttal – so the picture that graces our book about running is one I’m ashamed to admit I wasn’t even remotely prepared for. My only reassurance is that the picture is fairly small, and – unlike the digital master that it was taken from – you can’t zoom in close enough to see all the, um, "details" of my outfit from the waist down. Thank goodness for minor blessings.

So that’s your lesson for today, kids: always have the right clothes available when you need them - because you never know when you might end up in your swim suit on someone else’s bookshelf.

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