The long and short of it

When I was in the dressing room at TJ Maxx the other day, I had a moment.

It wasn’t my usual kind—being reminded, in the unforgiving bright light and full-length mirror, of the eerily transparent quality of my skin. No, this was a brand-new feeling. A realization. An epiphany, if you will.

I was trying on running shorts—a generally innocuous shopping activity. Looking for new workout clothes is usually a refreshing change to the old seriously-don’t-they-make-jeans-designed-to-fit-an-actual-human-form routine.

But I haven’t shopped specifically for gym attire in quite some time, and as I pulled pair after pair of running shorts off of their hangers, slipped them on, and assessed their fashion quality by turning (several times) in front of the mirror, it suddenly hit me: Somewhere over the course of my nascent has-been career, I adopted the style preferences of an old-lady runner.

In high school, you had to roll your waistband at least three times if you wanted to hang out with the cool kids at track practice. That is, your shorts couldn’t cover more than 75 percent of your butt cheeks.

In college, it was all about the spandex. There was, like, some sort of unspoken belief that spandex actually made you faster—something about muscle compression and aerodynamics, I suppose. But really, all it ever did was crawl up your crack.

I used to consider big, poofy, swishy shorts to be part of a category of workout fashion that should not be found in the closet of any woman under the age of 45.

And yet there I was in a pair of loose, mid-thigh-length shorts—in bubblegum pink, no less—and I actually…liked them. I liked them so much, in fact, that I bought them.

I ran in them for the first time a few days ago, and all I could think for the entire 40 minutes was, “Why the crud have I been wasting so much time dealing with wedgies and inner-thigh chafage when I could have been wearing a slightly more ugly but way less uncomfortable garment like this?”

So yeah, I like my pink old-lady shorts. Maybe I’ll even spring for a purple crushed velour sweat suit. Maybe.