In my shopping travels, I have been seeing some oddly shaped shoes – strange sloping soles that are immensely thick. Strange and peculiar and really – well, quite ridiculous. Run like a Masai Warrior – yeah right. For $4oo I could get an entire wide screen telly that would last a hell of a lot longer than a pair of fancy sneakers. They improve your entire life. Increase your stamina, improve your ciruclation, knit you a hand crafted cafe latte…ok. Maybe not so much the latte. But the greatest thing since automated coffee machines…

Weird shoes. Rocking chairs for feet. RIDICULOUS. Waste of money.

BUT….

I have succumbed to marketing pressure.

I have bought in to the hype.

I am now the very proud owner of my very own pair of Wobbly Boots.

Yes, today I purchased a pair of “Shape-Ups” – which, if I am to believe the advertising material, will make me BEAUTIFUL! They will tone my calves, improve my posture, flatten my belly and generally turn me into a red hot spunkrat in next to no time! And all I have to do is wear them as I go about my normal business. Now, as you may have gathered, I am not one to buy into this sort of thing, but I was reading Sarah Wilson’s column in the Sunday Age on the weekend, and she was talking about wearing her very own pair of Wobbly Boots, and Sarah was impressed. But still -  I don’t get tricked into things that seem too good to be true. I am a cynic. I am not easily fooled.

So why on earth did I buy these shoes?

They are not pretty at all. So it wasn’t for their looks. They can only be described as cute in the same way that fat, ugly babies and those dogs with all the skin folds are cute. (They’re not really – cute is something you call them to be polite). But I’ve been looking at them for a very long time, and picking them up and looking at them and examining them for important things such as evidence of arch support (when one is quite elderly, one needs to look for these sorts of things) and finally seeing a pair that did not look as though they were medieval instruments of torture or footwear for purely remedial purposes…and finding them hot on the heels of reading an article about them, I tried them on.

Ok, I do have peculiar feet. I am between sizes ( 9 1/3 would be just about right), and I have a rather odd gait. I also have this stray bone that wanders about (yes, I squicked out a podiatrist – someone who plays with feet for a living was seriously disturbed by the tiny little bone that moves under the surface of my foot). Shoes tend to press in awkward places and not only that, the strange shoe size means that shoes are too wide at the back when just right at the front, and too tight at the front when just right at the back. So I really was not expecting much…

Then I put them on.

Bouncy.

Oooh, these are fun.

I feel all SPRING-Y and BOUNCE-Y and oh, these feel alright and oh, if I pop those insoles in there, then that will make the back just right as well… ok do you have them in black…you have one pair in black…can I think about it…oh dear, in the ten minutes I’ve been in the shop, two other people have come in tried on and waltzed off with their very own bouncy shoes…OK I’LL TAKE THEM.

I put them on when I got back to work and wobbled about the office. Hrrm. Are those my CALF muscles I am feeling? All I have done is run down stairs…OOh, what if there’s something in it? What if I am in fact two weeks away from scintillating legs and buns of steel (oooh did someone mention buns? I could go a bun…) So I wore them on the Long Walk Home. Two and a half kilometres of – well, it’s not exactly hilly, but it’s not flat either. More one of those really gradual, slightly insidious gradients that steals ones breath when one least expects it. So yes, a 2 1/2 km walk should seperate the men from the boys…

Twenty five minutes of brisk walking later, Lordy Miss Maudy, I felt like I’d been on a 10km hike. My calves were burning, I could feel my arse cheeks tingling and well. Yes, suprisingly one can actually use ones abdominal muscles at the same time. I came home from work and collapsed in a heap. Exhausted, I was. Ok, it’s been a while since I walked home but that was like I’d run a flippin’ marathon. Every muscle in my legs were busily telling me to listen to them and SIT DOWN ALREADY.

Wearing them tomorrow?

You bet my arse I will!

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