Insanity: Day 11

Woo, 11 days down only a billion more to go! The work outs are still intense although I'd like to think that I'm pushing through them a little better. I still want to die about two minutes into the warm up, but my butt kicks are more butt kicky and my high knees are starting to get higher than my ankles, although they're not quite above my hips where they should be. I'm kind of thinking that as soon as I adjust to these work outs in the next couple weeks (ie getting through without taking too many unscheduled collapses breaks) that the work out will shift into high gear and we'll be dying all over again.

Thus far, E and I have been working out religiously in our living room, often barefoot on the wood floor, and it's starting to become pretty uncomfortable. We're tentatively committing to Insanity for at least another 60 days after this round, maybe even 120 days, so I went out today and bought us some proper shoes and work out mats. We are supposed to be wearing "good" cross trainers but since I'm not sure how many cycles we'll do and didn't want spend $200, I settled on some comfortable but inexpensive New Balances that should do the trick. 

Hopefully these will make my feet hurt less, though they're not really Cross Trainers

E's Cross Trainers, hopefully they fit!

I also got one giant single person exercise mat to practice with so we can see if we like it before buying another. We do a lot of jumping on the ground to do push ups and exercises on our hands and knees and I think it'll be more comfortable than the wood floor. It might even be big enough for us to both use, but I doubt it since we can't be too close together while working out.

A Shoe By Any Other Name Would Fit So Well

Before I start yaking about wedding shoes, I should preface this post by saying that I have really really crappy feet. I like to think they're fairly attractive feet on the whole, not too big or too small, with long skinny toes and a slender heel. Unfortunately, as far as walking apparatuses go, they suck. Hard. After a long career of wearing a mixture of vans, chucks, and doc martins, my poor tootsies succumbed to plantar fasciitis and now require the use of butt ugly orthotics to function in normal society. This means the lovely arsenal of shoes in my closet go unworn and I'm stuck in new balance sneakers or Birkenstocks. This makes finding wedding shoes a little difficult since you generally don't want to wear butt ugly orthopedic shoes under your wedding dress. 

At my line fitting the other day, the dress maker had an obvious and yet ingenious suggestion. Buy two pairs of shoes. The pretty shoes will be used in all the pictures, peaking out from under the dress to show off my hippie loving amazing fashion taste. After the last picture, before I walk down the aisle, I have the ugly but comfortable shoes hidden under my dress and discreetly slip my feet out of the pretty ones and into the comfy ones and walk down the aisle with no one the wiser. Depending on the shoe, I might even be able to walk down the aisle in the pretty shoes and just switch out after the ceremony. It would depend a lot on the heel since the ceremony is outside and a skinny heel would sink in the grass. I know most people would say just kick your shoes off, but since the dress will be hemmed to a certain height, I'd likely trip all over myself if I tried to wear it barefoot. 

So, buying two pairs of shoes means finding two pairs that aren't too expensive yet meet my exacting standards, including being the same height. I've decided that I really want the pretty pair to be blue. I would probably settle for silver if I had to, but I want them to be fun, funky and adorable, definitely not your typical white or ivory wedding shoes. That should help with the price since everything wedding is automatically more expensive, ergo non wedding shoes should be normally priced.  They should probably have a strap too, to prevent me from accidentally stepping out of them while I'm getting my boogie on. I found a pretty pair of silver Bruno Magli's that were expensive but cute and comfortable looking and they promptly sold out.  If I wanted to order them from the manufacturer, I'd need to shell out $350 which just isn't happening. So without further ado, I present:

The Pretty Shoe Contenders