My Great White Hope

The Nike Lunar Glide: Be still my heart.

Sometimes you have to kiss a lot of toads before you find your prince, and I think that after countless painful, blistering make out sessions with shoes I was told I should have loved, but instead rubbed me the wrong way (literally), I've finally found The Ones. At the very least, my new Nike Lunar Glides have given me the gift of several long, delightful, injury-free runs. (Even with my foot taped up from last week's injuries, I felt good in them.) The shoe is light, springy--and yet it cares about my shin splints, too. Running in them makes the road below feel like marshmallows instead of asphalt.

It's early to say whether these newfangled Nikes (with the tagline: "It really is rocket science") will be the white horse I'll ride all the way to the finishline of the Miami ING. But I've got every finger and toe crossed that we make it to there together.

You can find all the hype about Nike's hot new running shoe here, and in case you were wondering, I really am not a paid reviewer--I'm just a grateful runner. I'm just a grateful, accident and injury prone flat-footed runner whose insteps have been used and abused by nearly every running shoe out there. All of that changed, I think (I hope!) last week when I spotted the Nike Lunar Glides from across a crowded room at The Sports Authority.

That's actually not quite true: I guess you could say my first love was the Nike Air Zoom Road Explosion IIs, which also felt marshmallow-light and spared my insteps of blisters. But our love burned out fast: given their flimsy construction, they had to be replaced every 100 miles (quite a feat given that they were discontinued in 2008) and did nothing to protect my shin splints.

Plus, I took a lot of flak for my Nike Road Explosions from real runners and shoe fitting experts, who couldn't believe I'd racked up as much mileage as I had with so little protection. Honestly, after about 50 miles it wasn't much better than running barefoot.

Nevertheless, the feeling of running barefoot is still a lot better than the feeling of running in overbearing, thick, clumsy Brooks Dyads with ill-fitting orthotics. The Foot Solutions people did reconfigure my orthodics (for free!) so they supposedly will no longer cause blisters--though I was again told to wear them around the house for two weeks before attempting a run in them. And quite honestly, given that the last time I ran in my Brooks with their orthodics, I ended up with blisters that took more than 8 days to heal and forced me to take off two days of my training, I'm in no rush to give them another shot.

Also, the Brooks are so heavy and boxy and...okay, I'll say it: unsexy. They remind me of the kind of clunky, multiple-clasped and wired bras that elderly women call "brassieres." I'm more of a "bra" kind of girl.

And I guess I'm a Nike kind of girl, too.

"Just do it" sure works for the kind of person who became a runner just like that, one day on the Carnival Imagination cruise, when she just got an a treadmill after eating too much at the buffet and ran for an hour and 12 minutes until the gym personnel told her it was time for them to close. It had been more than a decade since I'd last run, and just like that, I just did it.

Again, I have to emphasize I'm not a Nike shill. Really, they are not paying me anything (though if they'd like to, they can pay me in free products.) I'm just a little bit infatuated right now. Jorie and Nike sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

But the last time I was really and truly in the throes of infatuation, I did end up marrying the guy, and eight years and two kids later, I have to say my instincts were right.

I just hope my sneakers and I do end up running off into the sunset together. (With my husband and two kids cheering me on from the sidelines of course.)