I'm hardly an expert on running gear. Or anything else, for that matter. But I do hear things and my ability to regurgitate information is working at a functional level.

I hear things like "cotton is the devil." It's not that cotton makes you do bad things ("Cotton once made me kill a man" or "The cotton talks to me at night and tells me to light fires"). It's just that for a runner, cotton sucks.

This blog entry by Peter Hadzipetros says it well:

Cotton holds in the sweat, keeps the moisture right next to your body. That's bad, whether the weather's warm or cold. Cotton's a recipe for pain that you will only discover later in the shower. Damp cotton rubbing against your skin means chafing.

Yeah - chafing. That's a bothersome issue. I went head to head with chafing last month - or should I say thigh to thigh. It'd been so long since I'd run in shorts I had forgotten what one sweaty patch of skin can do to another.

Chafing is a rascally sort of fellow - unobtrusive at first and then BAM! you find yourself running like a three-year-old who just wet himself.

Chafing takes days to heal, but Body Glide, I've discovered, can stave off the burning skin. It's like wearing a mouth guard when you and your friends play a rough round of human pinata - just a smart preventative measure.

And while preferences differ on the right running shoe, these probably aren't a good idea:

Which is why Anna and I were surprised to see two young guys running the Back Cove last night wearing shoes not unlike those pictured above. Had it been later in the summer, I could have passed it off as preparation for a college hazing event. They were otherwise dressed in appropriate running gear (shorts and t-shirts, at least) so the whole spectacle just didn't make sense.

It wasn't an isolated event, either. A few weeks ago we spotted the same guys running in similarly odd footwear.

I haven't any photos of the feet, but you can bet I'll be bringing my camera phone on next week's run.