My sporting beard

I decided that I need to do some fucking exercise, because sitting around in my pants drinking cans of Red Stripe and eating fried chicken whilst laughing about the good genes that mean I hardly ever put on weight was probably going to lead to an extremely ironic heart attack at the age of thirty five.

I picked running, because it's cheap, doesn't involve sweating in a basement with a bunch of other women, and also involves fresh air. And I like the idea of running, thanks to some very romantic Nike ads. To get me started I was going to need some basic equipment, since running in converse and skinny jeans probably wasn't going to be a good idea. I haven't bought trainers since I was thirteen and used to buy four quid pairs from ShoeFayre for PE class, so I asked my friend Gemma to help me.

This wasn't the only reason I asked Gemma to help me. Sports shops are mysterious and foreign to me. The walls are always hung with painful looking instruments of torture, the staff are always watching you expectantly and saying things like "did you want sweat slick technology?" and the customers are usually fully paid up members of the chav community, buying "fashion trainers", which I'm sure is a contradiction in terms. It's terrifying.

Even a simple pair of trainers, once you're past the fashion section, isn't as easy at it sounds. There were running, cross, and trail labelled trainers which all looked the fucking same. The ones I eventually bought had "shock absorb technology" which apparently was a good thing. They make my feet look like I've duct taped pillows to them, which is also exactly how they feel.

Gemma then also suggested that a sports bra might be a good idea, even for tits as titchy as mine. I decided she was right, mostly because my right boob tends to hurt in the area of my scar if I run up stairs too fast or something. I eventually found one that didn't smoosh my girls up towards my shoulders, or mould them into weird points, and myriad other bizarre options that were clearly designed by someone who had never actually seen a breast, and had only heard about them from vague description.

As the proud owner of a lot of unused sportwear, I'm hoping the shame of buying this stuff will spur me on to use it, to at least justify the amount of time today I spent being patronised by people wearing airtex polo shirts with absolutely no irony whatsoever.