Can a pair of socks ruin your day? Can they change your mood? Can they become a problem? But not just any problem but the mother of all your troubles? They can, they can. Here they are if they can. Many marathon runners take advantage of the lunch break to train. There isn’t much to waste. Hardly an hour and a half in which you have to fit everything in. You have to change, run, shower and compose yourself before returning to the office among colleagues who have already eaten and calmly drank a coffee. Anyone who runs knows very well that every minute spent undressing and re-dressing is an extra minute of training. So he’s almost always in a hurry. But not everything always goes smoothly. You open your bag, put on your tank top, cardio, shirt and shorts and leave your socks for last. But they can’t be found. Take a closer look, turn the bag upside down from which everything comes out: shower gel, leg warmer cream, a water bottle, a box of batteries, slippers, a bar now well seasoned, a roll of adhesive tape, a glove that you haven’t found for months and more. Only the socks are missing. Panic. You check again, take a closer look, lie down on the floor of the locker room to make sure they haven’t ended up under the bench. Nothing. Nothing at all. While the clock is ticking it seems like we’re at Rischiatutto. What to do? Two hypotheses: run without socks but it’s a couple of degrees outside and it’s raining as God sends it, or use the ones you arrived with and then go back to work without them. In both cases it will not be a success. But that’s not the point. For someone who already had in mind running for an hour and 15 minutes, who had sped up his meeting so as not to miss even a second, who had even denied himself coffee at the bar so as not to drag it out, the inconvenience is not something to be expected. little. And then do you want to do a workout with a nice pair of running socks or a pair of blue calf-high lisle socks? This is the exact moment when there is a small short circuit in your head. They turn you around. The mood changes, any solution your mind comes up with becomes bullshit and the solidarity of the boy who is changing next to you is worthless: “Just think, I once forgot my shorts…”. But who cares about your shorts! The problem now is the socks: here and now. And it’s my problem. annoying or rather enormous, unsurpassable like a tuna that they advertised on TV many years ago. Somehow you patch up a workout but the day is gone. Crooked, ruined as only runners can understand. And in fact you go back to the office and everyone looks at you as if they had seen a madman: “What happened to you? Have you argued with the devil?”. Worse, much worse. I forgot my socks…