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Cranky old-timer pens angry letter over Blue Jeans Mile

By Logan Scott Wells

July 18, 2017

Dear Citius Mag,

It is with great frustration and displeasure that I pen this angry letter to you. I have several complaints regarding your newest racing “innovation” known as the Blue Jeans Mile. To be quite frank, I haven’t been this riled up since Nike (rhymes with “Ike”) strapped those laser-guided rockets to the feet of some Kenyan fella and shipped him off to Antarctica to attempt something that Steve and Bill Rogers could have done on a steady regimen of cigarettes and diet coke. Reminds me of when Coach Palmer would wrap a bungee cord around our waist, hitch us to the back of his diesel powered golf-cart, and tell his wife, “floor it, Margie!” Ol’ Palmey got the axe last year because he was honest and told some porker freshman that he could stand to lose a pound or fifty. And people wonder why this country’s going to the dogs.

But I digress.

My issue isn’t with a multi-billion-dollar corporation born of fair, unbiased, free-market capitalism. My issue is with you, Citius Mag. Why, just the other day, my hippie grandson was poking around on his fancy internet machine and showed me one of those moving pictographs all the kids are using now-a-days (I think it’s called a GILF?). It looked like some emaciated little girl sprinting down a paved track (by the way, when did they stop using cinders?) in some sort of sweatpants. Turns out, it wasn’t a lady at all, but some prissy-man with hair down to his butt crack. And that wasn’t even the most disturbing part. Lady-boy’s “sweatpants” were, honest to God, a pair of stone-washed denim blue jeans.

Now I’m no fogey. I didn’t try and stop Katherine Switzer when she ran the Boston Marathon (this time), and I put up with all those stupid electronic timing chips they make you tie into your shoelaces. But this race you all are trying to promote is a disgrace to the sport of running, and the good, god-fearing, denim wearing people of this United States.

First of all, there’s already too many gimmicks and showboats out there on the track. You’ve got participant trophies, people chugging beers mid-run, and that Mo Farah character smacking his head while he sprints past the folks who actually worked hard the entire race. And don’t even get me started on Nick Symmonds. Point is, this whole show adds nothing to my or anyone else’s enjoyment of track and field. I already get enough chafing running in my 100% cotton split shorts that I’ve had since 1974 and clomping around in my Air Monarch IV’s.

And then there’s the whole issue of blue jeans themselves. Denim is a high-quality fabric meant for landscaping, coal mining, and Brett Favre commercials. I know your reading base is probably a bunch of liberal snowflakes like my deadbeat son-in-law who buy their jeans pre-torn and acid washed, but goddamnit, a man’s pants used to mean something. This whole thing is a slap in the face to blue-collar workers everywhere. We used to carry our lunch pail, eight miles to work, uphill both ways. We didn’t have no fancy watches or EPO-L-Cartine-blood-transfusion-psycho-therapy bullshit. There weren’t any “fancy-bear” hackers, and a guy named Prefontaine used to tell it like it was. Now there’s just a bunch of video-blogging YouTubers shouting “Not My President” and wearing compression socks. Pisses me off.

Aw hell, would you look at that? You got me all riled up, and now I’ve got to go take my blood-thinners. Thanks a lot, you Citwits.

Cantankerously,

Cranky Old-Timer

Logan Scott Wells

Logan holds an MA in creative writing from Ohio University. He is currently coaching at his alma mater, Hanover College, in Southern Indiana. He also works and runs for @ColumbusRunning