Designer labels nearly killed my running career.

I’ve done my time on the catwalks of Paris and Milan, sweetie (yeah, right!), but just the other day high fashion almost destroyed my running career.

I’d had two good training runs commuting to and from work, and headed for the shower in preparation for a romantic night out with Mrs RTS. Now, she holds some weird delusion that I can actually ‘scrub-up rather well’. So I thought I’d put some effort in to prove her right. The first designer to try and injure me was Giorgio Armani.

Armani had gone to the trouble of making some nice smelling shower gel that I thought might stoke Mrs RTS’s fire should she get close enough to me to titillate her olfactory senses. Usually she doesn’t get too close as I tend to lather myself in ‘Eau de mud, sweat and mountains’.

Unfortunately, Giorgio had packed the gel into a bottle with sharp pointy corners. The bottle wouldn’t balance in my shower, and eventually fell pointy-corner down right onto my toenail. Or rather it would have hit my toenail had the toenail still been there instead of having fallen off a while ago.  Whatever foot part the bottle did hit, it hurt like hell and could quite possibly have caused serious injury.

I would have been safer if I had used my usual form of body cleansing. The ‘Imperial Leather’ paper label that used to have some soap stuck to its backside has never tried to kill me.

After limping out of the shower I headed to the wardrobe. Next to have a pop was Calvin Klein. Going for maximum seduction possibility I decided to pull on a pair of his boxer shorts. You know the ones – remember the David Beckham picture? (yes, ladies, I’m sure you do) Golden Balls made these look like a thin veneer of lycra sprayed over the uneaten contents of a fruit bowl.

Anyway, whilst dressing from a standing position I got the first leg through with no trouble. The second leg got snagged in the clingy fabric. Balance went haywire and my body tottered head first towards Mrs RTS’s dressing table. This wouldn’t have happened if I had been pulling on my Ron Hill tracksters instead.

Were it not for my super-quick mongoose-like reflexes I would have gone face forward into Mrs RTS’s potions, lotions and sharp-cornered antique pine.

Calvin’s trip nearly resulted in the violent removal of my teeth and rearrangement of my facial features as I would surely have impacted into a collection of bottles and jars made by Chanel, Cardin, Gaultier et al. I narrowly averted a creamy, sweet-smelling blood-bath trip to casualty. Had I made it out of the hospital in time to get to our dinner date I wouldn’t have been able to consume anything after the soup course. And I'd have needed a straw for that.

So from now on I’m going to forget designer stuff and stick to functional.

Maybe the Devil really does wear Prada.

I, however, will stick with Inov8.