If You Want Warm and Fuzzy All The Time (you might want to consider a stuffed animal)...But Here is My Attempt at Giving You That Today

I am still busy as a bee and just not a lot of time to write, heck I am missing lunch altogether today, but I thought since there was such an uproar over the Pearl Izumi ad I used yesterday to get a point across about a personal experience with maybe more than one person in my real life (the ad was not used for a source of debate and I am (for now) going to leave my opinion about the ad's to myself....So now I give you the warm and fuzzy adverstisement that will make everyone feel better.

Just remember that I have bad days and bad situations, and I think it would be irresponsible of me to put out a facade that made me look like everything was hunky-dorry in my world 100% of the time.  :O)

And Jamoosh also wrote a great post about my post, and well...I know where I stand on the matter but I am outraged at the thought of a marathon with no time limit and where there were people 'doing' the marathon that actually stopped for lunch.

And if you haven't seen one of the comments left on yesterdays post, I am posting it here because ... well ... I agree with everything he wrote.  Especially the part I bolded and underlined.

I think their ads are awesome. The thing I love about running and the marathon is the challenge to excel. There's nothing like the marathon. Too many people focus on the idea that this ad, or any of their ads, are about fast versus slow. To me, it's about those willing to do their best versus those who do the bare minimum, or slightly less. I tend to be a front-of-the-pack runner, but I can relate to a mid or back of the pack runner if they are truly going out there and giving their best effort. I don't care about pace, and no respectable person does. What's important is whether you are giving all you can when the race comes. It doesn't matter if you're a front, mid or back of the pack runner. If you don't respect the fact that running a race was originally created as a form of competition, to push yourself and improve yourself in the spirit of competition, and worse, you look down on people who place an importance on their performance, their preparedness and are a little obsessed with self-improvement in running, then I will never be able to relate to you, and this ad campaign won't either. I love to see people struggle across the finish line, 3, 4 and 5 hours after it starts. If they are struggling because they worked their tail off and gave their all, I love them all the more. But if someone (who thinks they are busier than, or somehow their time is more important than, the other 20,000 runners in the race) tries to say what they do and don't have time for, make excuse after excuse about why they cannot run often, then they show up for the race, walk 3/4 of it, may or may not finish in the allotted time, and expect the rest of us to put them on the same "level" as someone who maybe ran an equivalent time but DID put IN THE WORK, they are barking up the wrong tree...AND they will be offended by an ad campaign like this.

I love this ad. It says "Here's what I like to do, and yeah, it's hard, but you know what? I'm going to go out and do the best I can each time and RACE each time I'm out there. And by the way, you should too."