at last, a good running shirt

If your physical form is slightly below the ideal; if, like me, your body is – how to put this? – somewhat lacking in grace, beauty and athleticism, then finding clothing to wear while exercising is a pretty fraught process.

I notice lots of girls at the moment going for the uniform of some species of black tights below the waist and a pinky-peach-coloured top above. That seems to work okay for them, but I don’t think it’s a unisex look, particularly.

For me, shorts are a disaster. Actually, it’s the legs that are the disaster, but finding shorts to cover them up appropriately is pretty stressful too.

Shirts aren’t so bad, generally, although you can still go wrong. I bought last year’s (2008) Run for the Kids event t-shirt in a fit of charity and optimism about the size of my “pecs”. It didn’t fit, was a yucky colour and was hopeless to run in, oweing to the fact it ended up dripping with sweat and weighing a tonne in about 3 minutes.

This year I held off buying one until race day, so I could have a look at them first. I did buy one on the day, and boy am I happy.

It’s possibly the best running shirt I’ve ever had. It fits me, it’s light and soft and doesn’t get heavy with sweat. I’ve only had it 10 days and I think I’ve worn it 4 times already.

Good stuff.

Running
I was, and am, severely sleep-deprived today, so I didn’t expect much from my lunch-time run. Still, you never know if you don’t try, so I headed up to Princes Park for a tempo session. It turned out pretty well, even in the wind. I did 7 minutes fast, 3 minutes normal, then 7 minutes fast, then 3 minutes normal. With warmup and cool down it turned out a smidgen over 12.5km.