Shopping day
So yesterday the famous five gathered in Oxford Street at the ASICS flagship store for a day of being spoilt rotten, in the true spirit of Christmas. For 'tis better to give than receive... and ASICS managed that pretty well!
The day started with a mercy tube ride to Euston to rescue RunnyRunRun and escort her across London. After explaining to her how ticket machines worked, we made our way to Oxford Street and the store itself, where we proceeded to take embarrassing tourist-y shots of ourselves gurning outside the store before scarpering before we got noticed by anyone important...
Here's me not looking foolish at all.
I then got a phone call from Kat from Runners World asking why we'd been standing outside taking photos of ourselves and then done a runner... To coin a phrase: "Bugger".
We were shown inside and, I have to say, the store is amazing - anyone who can get themselves to London, it is well worth a visit. It is jam-packed with tech, from 3D foot scanners, gait analysis, VO2 max machines... the works.
They let us lose to choose our free gear and Shady_Ady, A.W and myself proceeded to fight over all the medium-sized running kit... Fortunately, I think we all just about got what we wanted without violence breaking out.
Then came the photos... so many photos... I'd never thought before that it could be hard work, just standing there whilst someone took snaps. Wrong! The photgrapher had apparently been raised in Nazi Germany and after spending half an hour being shifted two millimetres to the left, then three to right, crossing my arms, uncrossing my arms... smiling, not smiling, fierce-gazing, dramatically gazing into the distance... no not over there, the distance over there... he eventually relented.
I then had to give a video interview with the lovely Katie from RW:
No, I don't know what she's doing here either.
I thought the photos were tough... I made it through the interview in one piece but I'm not sure exactly what I said! Apologies in advance...
Luckily, us five were not the only ones to suffer and Rachel from ASICS had to take her fair share of the punishment:
Then came gait analysis and I was pleased to be told that I do not over-pronate as much as I used to... although Carl, who did the gait analysis for me, told me that I had "lovely" feet. I'm not quite sure how to take this.
Whilst getting my gait analysis done, I had about another two thousand photos taken and spent an informative five minutes, whilst the photographer tried to get the perfect shot, posing and watching Carl point to a model of the bones in a human foot whilst he was actually talking about cheese. Carl loves cheese and knows almost as much about it as he does about gait.
Feta is his preferred cheese, in answer to your unasked question, and he loves a nice cheese board.
The whole day was great fun and flew past so quickly. We were lucky enough to be able to choose £500 of ASICS kit (!!) and then, as if that were not enough, given a Garmin 210 Forerunner each!
My four team-mates were all great fu
