Everything fails eventually


Running destroys everything it touches. There’s the expensive GPS watches made of some kind of sweat-soluble rubber, that dissolve and perish in less than a season. There’s the shoes where the sole peels away from the mid of the shoe while you’re out for a shirt jog, and get unceremoniously dumped in the bin. (To be fair, I think I’d already run a marathon in those shoes.) There’s every single pair of shorts where the elastic gives way, the drawstring around the waist decides to retract so only one end dangles out, useless to tighten them, and the zips on the back pockets seize up or tear away from the surrounding material.

Every single fastener will fail. I had otherwise perfectly serviceable backpacks, except that the salt from all the sweat had corroded the zips so that they couldn’t be opened ever again. Velcro, after repeated submersions in perspiration, gives up its magical powers and stops holding things together. Poppers and buckles just break.

Camelbaks fill with black mould. Fitbits die without even being exposed to exercise, so we’ll ignore them, johnny-come-lately debutantes to this destructive business. Sunglasses get forgotten in exhausted fugue states and left behind on top of cars, on bus seats, down the back of sofas. I rue the day I bought a Garmin with a white strap, a strap that turned brown with dirt in a few short months.

Socks? Socks have the lifespan of the mayfly. They fray, they lose their elastic, they vanish in ones and twos to the insides of washing machines, they stop feeling fun, they become inextricably combined with toenail clippings, gravel and dust. You can never stop buying socks.

Running shirts, however, are pretty indestructible. No zips, no fastenings. They just lose their colour, lose their clinginess, lose their softness, and fail to lose the stench of body odour that builds up over time. Opinion will vary on whether this is failure or not.

Training plans. Ha. No training plan ever survives contact with the enemy (reality).

Today, I noticed my heart rate strap was falling apart. It comprises two parts, a inner plastic band that is electroconductive, and an outer fabric strap, which has just become unstuck from the inner. This, after less than a year and a half of intermittent usage. The old heart rate bands, inflexible lumps of hard plastic, never died like this. I just left them behind on planes, lost them in house moves or stuffed them in the wrong bag and never found them again.

But I’m sure they’d have fallen apart eventually.


3 responses to “Everything fails eventually”

  1. Socks true, but most of the rest of my kit is still intact. My shoes especially have lasted forever. Maybe two years? Granted I probably run less than you do. Maybe it is the climate?

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