I love shoes. I’m a girl. I can’t help it. It’s in my genetics. Being as it’s now sandal season, I love shoes even more. Especially cute orange sandals (like the pair I just bought – CUTE!) with pretty painted toe-nails. Pedicures are my guilty pleasure. Right now my toes are au-natural with white tips (AKA: French). And they do look nice. Most days. Just not today.

My half-marathon is two weeks from tomorrow – June 14th. Today was my last looooong run before R-day (run day). Eight miles. The good part? It was in the 50’s when I left. The bad part? I had to run alone. Eight long, lonely miles all by myself because my running partner wasn’t around. (Can you hear Deirks Bentley singing, ‘It’s a long trip alone…’?) And because I ran alone, bad things happened.

You see, I have no problem shopping for adorable sandals to go with outfits. I love browsing shoe shops and the mall looking for that can’t-pass-up-pair. But running shoes??? Ugh. Boring. They’re NOT cute. And they’re NOT fun to shop for. And because I have this weird nerve thing in my left foot that makes my toes go numb anytime I run over six miles, I need to have special stabilizer shoes that you can’t just grab at the local Nike outlet. Which means, I have to go to a special running store. With the 3-yr old. Get on the treadmill. Have them watch me run, then pick out a pair I’ll probably have to special order. How fun is that??? Shop for un-cute shoes and then not even get to leave the store with them? Ack!

So in my wisdom, I have pushed off going running shoe shopping. And today I’m paying the price. My left foot has been semi-numb all day from my nine mile run (yeah, you read that right. NINE miles, not eight. Without my running partner I ran more than I was supposed to because she wasn’t there telling me when to stop.) And because that pretty French pedicure was just a little longer than it should have been, when I whipped off my sock I found a bloody stump where one nail had gouged another toe and ripped it to shreds. Fun, huh? The only good part about the whole fiasco is I spent a lot of time thinking and working through plot issues in the current WIP while I was running, but still…my feet hurt.

My latest splurge:

So what’s your guilty pleasure?