THROUGH THICK AND THIN
Making our kit last (and last) while building a relationship through shared miles and memories is kinder on the planet and can enrich our running. Liz Fraser confesses her undying love for her threadbare shorts, and five other runners share the stories behind the treasured kit they never want to be parted from
I’m a 70s kid. Born in the faded Kodak decade where ‘make do and mend’ was a necessity, not a lifestyle choice or hashtag, when non-white bread was classed as ‘exotic’ and coffee shops were still tea shops. A beautiful, now lost (and, for me at least, much lamented) time of simplicity; of chocolate bars the size of one’s palm, not a palm tree; when people had a just-get-on-with-it attitude that I retain to this day.
It was also a decade in which, for many of us, clothing brands – especially sports clothing brands – were yet to become anything more than a name on a label that we never really looked at. You just wore what you wore and could afford – or whatever was handed down to you from an older sibling or friend – and you reused and reused it, day in day out, until it fell apart.
What you did was more important than what you were wearing when you did it, or how many times you’d already worn the same garment. Fast fashion hadn’t taken hold yet, thankfully, and being seen 20 times in the same hoodie didn’t merit any eye-rolling or online comments. (Oh, for those days again!)
In sport, and perhaps especially in running, this chilled-out sartorial norm of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ applied, too. My parents, who were both very active and sporty, brought us up to ski, mountain climb and know one end of an athletics track from the other. They had sports gear so old you could probably put it in a museum even back then… and they still wear much of it now, 40 years later.
The care put into their items of sports kit to make them last as long as possible was amazing. I’d watch my dad spend hours at the end of a long day’s skiing carefully waxing our skis, my mother polishing our climbing boots every few days to keep the leather waterproof and soft, and much sewing and darning going on, over an evening episode of Inspector Morse. Photographs of that time show us in almost the same outfit every day for months, even years.
It never occurred to me that any of this was strange; you just had one pair of running shoes or a T-shirt you wore and mended, wore and mended, and eventually grew out of before you couldn’t mend it any further. Why would you need new trainers if you already had one pair that worked perfectly well?
I wore my brother’s old hand-me-down Adidas tracksuit, complete with elbow patches and sewn-up holes, not because it was a fashion statement, but because Adidas was one of only about two ‘makes’ anyone could get their hands on, and when he grew
