All entries for Friday 31 October 2008

October 31, 2008

Trainers surprise

Mizuno trainers I was pleased but slightly disconcerted the other day, when I was contacted via this blog and asked if I’d like to review a pair of trainers, which I’d then get to keep. (I guess there’s no alternative to that plan, really; you can’t sell trainers that somebody else has walked around in for a week.)

I’ve touched on the topic of trainers once or twice before but it would be a gross exaggeration to say that I’m any kind of expert, or that this blog is any kind of go-to place for trainer aficionados. So although I said that I’d be happy to review a pair of trainers in exchange for keeping them (finally! this whole blogging lark pays off!), I was a bit puzzled about why. It’s not even as if there’s much that I can say about trainers that might influence anyone else; being comfy on my feet and pleasing to my eye is almost completely irrelevant to anyone who isn’t me. But on reflection, of course, it’s not the shoes that I’m being encouraged to talk about so much as the place that sells them; talking about them and linking to them is good for them.

And that’s fair enough, because both the shoes I’ve been sent and the place that sent them to me have been great. The shoes are these ones, if anyone’s interested, and the web site, which is called fitnessfootwear.com sells lots of other running shoes too. The guy who contacted me couldn’t have been nicer, and when I said that I’d want to explain that I was writing about the shoes because I’d been given them, not completely spontaneously, they were fine with that. The web site is easy to use in an Amazon-ish way, and the shoes arrived the very next day after I’d chosen a pair. So there we go: discount my opinion by as much as you think is appropriate for someone who’s gained a pair of trainers, but I’d be happy to use the site again and pay my own money, and I’d recommend them as a good and more focussed choice than a general purpose web retailer such as Amazon.