Running kit seems to be upping its game of late. Now that manufacturers have nailed the wicking fabrics so we no longer have to run while carrying a couple of pints of our own sweat in our t-shirts, they’ve decided to turn their attention to making it look nice.

Lots of boutique sports brands aimed at women who are happy to spend more on a pair of capri pants than I would part with for a night out in London have been popping up. The running skirt was invented (if you haven’t read The Angry Runner on running skirts you should). The message being that you can look great while working out. This is, of course nonsense. As I’ve said before, you can’t look good while running – but you can look awesome.

If you’re spending more time in your running clothes than your civilian clothes, and your wardrobe is becoming increasingly full of lycra and polyester – I can understand that you’d want it to look nice, for at least as long as it takes to do your warm-up. That you might want your own style to be reflected in your kit (luckily my style is ‘big sweaty mess’).

Running shoes haven’t traditionally been the most attractive of items. Prescribed, as they are, for runners based on gait, distance run and training load – form comes second to function. And often quite a very distant second. The colours haven’t always been exciting – white with perhaps a bit of blue if you’re a guy and a patronising pink for women.

So, when Nike asked me if I wanted to design my own running shoes I remembered that time when I first started running: when the shop assistant fitting me my first pair of running shoes pulled the nerdiest looking things I’d ever seen out of a box and handed them to me and when my only instinct to run was as far away from those shoes as possible, and I said yes please.

The idea with NIKEiD is that you choose the colours of pretty much every part of your running shoes, write your name or a motivational message on the tongue and then Nike make them and post them out to you. It’s like pic ‘n’ mix for running shoes but with brighter colurs. So that’s how I became the proud owner of these new customised Nike Frees. And how my whole belief system regarding running kit being purely functional was rocked forever.