Walk a Mile in My Shoes

Walk a mile in my shoes and your heels will pinch. I've been denying it for awhile now, but my running shoes aren't fitting so well anymore. I thought if I could just drink enough water, maybe my feet wouldn't swell and I could avoid the whole barefoot and pregnant look. While I don't have "cankles," (a really unflattering term I learned during pregnancy to describe the lack of definition between the calves and feet due to swelling) biology says pregnant woman's feet can change shape, mainly by growing (permanently) flatter, and as much as I had hoped that I could just will away certain side effects, something has changed. Now the beds of my shoes feel too narrow at the heels, and I really wasn't expecting changes in my feet there. But, hey stranger things have happened during pregnancy.

I finally started shopping for new shoes and discovered that entering a running shoe store is far more humorous when you're pregnant. Sometimes I feel overly self conscious about looking pregnant, because I'd prefer to blend in with the crowd. There are some Uptown bars (ahem, meat markets) packed with tall, skinny, well-dressed singles on a drunken prowl where as a married pregnant woman who prefers to go to bed at 9:30 p.m., I feel horribly out of place. But as long as I don't draw too much unwanted attention, it can be fun to shock people's assumptions. As for the running shoe store, you don't catch anyone as off guard as you do lifting weights at the gym or carting an (empty) vodka box on each shoulder out of a liquor store, (really, I was looking for storage boxes and those boxes are the perfect size for books) but being in places some would least expect a pregnant woman to be, even as benign a location as a running shoe store, can be surprisingly uplifting.

As I walked in, I wanted to imagine the salespeople and fellow shoppers were in awe in the presence of a pregnant athlete. (An athlete who considers a 5K a long race. Shhhh....) Or at least I let them think I'm still a runner, since knee problems pre-pregnancy sidelined my running regime long ago and I haven't actually tried to run since my 17th or 18th week. Or maybe some of that runner's natural high was rubbing off on me and being around people who like to exercise made me feel like a runner again. Kind of like watching gourmet cooking shows makes you feel like a cook without actually doing any cooking on your own part. Either way, I liked the extra attention from the saleswoman and talking about running as if I weren't actually pregnant. It just made me feel normal again.

Next, I'd like to make a stop at Lowe's and ask to see their jackhammers.