I got a pair of runners four years ago, because they looked pretty cool on a chick in a Lorna Jane catalogue.  I did not try them on, nor did I get ‘assessed’ (yes, this is now a thing) by a manchild in a sports shop.  I just popped online, whacked in my PayPal deets, and voila, they arrived at my door.  So you see, even purchasing the exercise equipment can be done tres lazee (French* for bloody lazily).

The next step took me out of the actual house, and into the actual LJ.

Insert misty dream-sequence overlay:  

Oh Lorna, you really do know how to woo the forty-something, flabby female.  Stretchy singlets telling me to “Never Give Up” and “Eat More Crap Food” *, comfy pants with elastic waists for when I’m retaining nachos, you even have exercise bra-ish crop tops with breast augmentation, which is of paramount importance when exercising, I find.  Oh Lorna, your change-rooms are spacious and opulent and dimly lit, you make a lady feel like a certain kind of “lady” as I strip off each layer and replace it with spandex.  Oh Lorna, I can’t decide between so many of your items, that my brain goes kind of funny and I find myself at the checkout with a total of four hundred and twenty-seven dollars worth of potential sweat sponges.

WHAT???!!!

End of dream-mist

So I told the puzzled looking gym-nymph with the money-munching-machine that I had to “Go to the actual bank” and ran out of the store faster than the Lithglow Flash.  It seemed I didn’t need exercise gear after all, just a jolly good fright to get my legs moving and my chest heaving.  And that was without the crop-tits.

Four years on, and I haven’t been back to Lorna’s shop, in fact, I usually scurry quickly by, heart-rate up, face averted, lest the nymphette grab me and force that pile of comfort upon me.  Four years on, and those runners that looked great on the model, are still rubbish to walk in, let alone run.  They are microscopically more comfy than high heels, so I wear them as slippers, during the two cold months we have here on Coast.

This week something shocking and strange happened: I made the hasty resolution to get fit.

I decided to go to an actual shop, where I could be ridiculed served by shop assistants half my age and percentage body fat and get me some shoes that wouldn’t cause my shins to splint if I looked at them sideways.  The manchild who served me was lovely and helpful and went to great pains to measure me up (apparently people don’t know their own shoes sizes any more) and diagnose my walking pattern.  I told him I knew what it was: slow to non-existent, but he insisted on video proof.  He told me to “walk normally” on the thingy, and all I could think of was John Cleese’s silly walks, but I could only remember the Hitler one, so I did that.  He just looked at me deadpan and said, “Hmmm, I can’t confirm your heel-strike from that, can you do it again?”  I told him to piss off and just gimme some shoes.

So he did, three choices in fact, all of them ugly and bright and …wonderfully cloud-like.  I wasn’t allowed to have the pretty pair I really wanted, because apparently, I have a neutral gait.  I’d say that’s right, if by neutral he meant ambivalent to any gait at all, and definitely nothing faster than a light trot.

I have bought the fluorescent little foot pillows home, and put them on and off and on again at least seventeen times.  They look ridiculous, and by default, I look ridiculous wearing them.  I feel like the Mardi Gras version of Jerry Seinfeld, with them on the ends of my legs.  I do however l do seem fitter since purchasing them, so they have served their purpose.  They cost enough to feed most of the small nation from whence they were crafted, so they are sitting on a shelf, all of their own, staring at me, as I stare back.  They are trying to wear me down, and into wearing them.  Don’t tell them it’s only Autumn, and I don’t need new slippers just yet.

The pricey slippers

* This may or may not be true.

What do you think about runners?  What brand do you have?