Cool Product Pick of the Week

I've been doing some experimenting with tincture of benzoin, which is available overnight from your Walmart pharmacy for about eight bucks. It's basically primer for your skin. It's not an adhesive per se, but it makes adhesives stick better. Much better! Like, my first photo idea for this blog entry was to show the hideous sight of me removing the BAND-AID Brand Tough-Strip Adhesive Bandage I had stuck to my leg using tincture of benzoin under one half but not the other. Turns out the adhesive in BAND-AID Brand Tough-Strip Adhesive Bandages is pretty damn tough to start with. It was a slow peel. The end with the benzoin, umm . . . let's just say I never though my skin and underlying tissue could stretch that far! Eventually I was able to pull the cloth fibers running the length of the band-aid loose leaving the cross-wise fibers stuck to my leg. One by one, I scraped the ends of the fibers up enough to grab them and pull them off, leaving a square patch very sticky glue on my leg. A week later I decided that the glue had been on my leg long enough so I removed it with some charcoal lighter fluid.

Today I tried some real-deal preventative foot care, using tincture of benzoin. I almost never get blisters on my feet, luckily, but I do get this "pre-blister" from time to time just behind the big toe on my right foot. It actually is a blister, but it is so laughably small and is covered by such thick hide that it really requires no care at all. But no matter, it's still fun to play around with tinctures and sterile lancets and such. I haven't found a local source for the 2" Elastikon tape my ultra-runner friends all recommend (I have no ultra-runner friends.) so I just used part of a BAND-AID Brand Tough-Strip Adhesive Bandage to pre-tape my one known hot spot. After my next death run at Hobbs, I'll get out the lighter fluid and see how my patchwork performed. And after that, I'm sure the novelty of tincture of benzoin will have worn off leaving me bored and extremely well equipped to repair the blister I will never get.

Such is the life of a medium distance runner.

f/4; 1/60 sec; ISO-250; auto flash.