For the first time ever I just ordered shoes online and had them delivered to my door – less than two working days since I ordered them.  I was more than a little excited to sign for the shoe box just now, but there is a story behind my excitement.

Last fall I bought my favourite shoes ever, my happy shoes I liked to call them.

My happy shoes 🙂

They were bright, they were colourful and the first day I used them I ran 32km without a problem.  I knew then that Asic’s Gel Nimbus 14’s were for me.  Thinking ahead, I bought another pair for the winter.  As posted before, that plan didn’t work since only after losing a toenail did I discover that the left shoe of the second pair was mislabelled and was in fact a half size smaller than the right shoe.  Who checks to see if the shoes are mismatched?  Well, I do now.  Running Room refunded the money but of course we are now in a new year and the Gel Nimbus 14 has morphed into the Nimbus 15.

I will try to keep the following rant brief.  Why do shoe companies insist on changing something every year???  If they had thousands of people buy a specific shoe, do they really need to screw around with the product?  If I buy Ketchup in 2013 and like it, I want the same product in 2014.  Go ahead, change the colour of the bottle if you want, but don’t give me some supposedly new and improved Ketchup that tastes nothing like the condiment I happily used until the bottle was empty.  I can’t begin to describe how ticked off I was when I tried the Nimbus 15’s only to discover it was like putting on a completely different shoe – and  a shoe that didn’t fit me properly at that.  It ends up the sizing isn’t even the same, many runners are finding they have to go up a half or whole size to get them to fit.  I have heard that fans of Nimbus 13 though are happy since 15 is similar and of course 14 wasn’t.  You almost need a degree in shoe research to be able to keep track of what is going on with your favourite shoes.

When I realized the 15 wasn’t going to work, I switched to the Brooks Ghost.  They are perfectly good shoes BUT….they are not my happy shoes!  They have done the job on several runs, definitely good enough for short runs, but I wasn’t convinced I was going to love them doing 30km in Hamilton in 3 weeks.  So it came time to search the web.  Runner’s Mark and Running Room had no Nimbus 14’s left and while I found a few pairs in my size (even in my favourite happy colour seen above) in the States I didn’t want to deal with the exchange rate and shipping charges.  Finally I found them on a site called 33-off.com.  I went a little more subdued – actually a lot more subdued since that was what was available – but I was prepared to have any colour just to be able to say I love my shoes again.

New Shoes!

So when I realized that the knock on my door today that I was ignoring was not in fact my children trying to be irritating, but instead Canada Post, I raced to the door just in time before he pulled away.  Did I care that it was 2:30 in the afternoon and I was still unshowered and in my pyjamas?  Hell no, my shoes had arrived !  And hey, it is March Break…I’m on holidays!  Once I have tested these ones out on a run (memories of the last ones that didn’t work out) I will probably order another pair (or 2) so that I don’t have to endure the craziness of shoe shopping for some time to come.