After a month or two of running in normal-person trainers, you realise that there’s a reason why runners don’t pound the pavement in cool Nike Airs – trainer manufacturers long ago gave up on the idea of trainers being any good for actual training. Run further than for a bus in them and they’ll prang you right up.

So you head off to buy some proper, sensible running shoes – sighing as you stride straight past Foot Locker and into Jim T. Peterson’s Sports, the shabby sporting-goods shop that’s always completely empty and has had the same faded golf umbrella in the window for the last six years.

They’re quite astoundingly ugly and they cost a bomb

And you buy some running shoes, and they’re quite astoundingly ugly, and they cost a bomb, and as you lace them up and gaze sorrowfully down at your minging-looking feet, a small part of you dies inside. But then you go for your first run in them, and you get it. You suddenly understand how Asics, Brooks, Salomon et al manage to stay in business, despite making the ugliest products imaginable.

You have a crossed a line, and there’s no turning back now. #runna4lyfe