How my $7.99 pair of Brooks Cascadias cost me big time.

I don't think that I'm the only one on the trails in this town or any other for whom one of the chief appeals of running early on was that it was cheap. Some shorts, a $40 pair of shoes and I'm outa here. And I even kind of resented the shoes part.

That was the idea. Though it didn't quite work out that way.

My downfall was finding a pair of bright yellow, used Brooks Cascadias at our local Goodwill. They were in awesome shape and they fit beautifully. They cost me $7.99 plus tax and I took them out running the very next morning. They were so much nicer than the cheap big name running shoes I'd been wearing, and I was so happy.

Only bad thing was, after a couple of months, I started to feel the trail a lot more intimately than I had when I got the yellow Brooks. They were wearing out.

Running shoes, I discovered, do that. Even though they still look fine, they just aren't any more. If you run, you know that. You've simply got to replace them. Experts say that you should replace your shoes every 300 miles or so. When I'm running a lot, that happens fast, so I need to bite the bullet every couple of months? Being cheap and a procrastinator, I usually stretch that out to every three months or so.

And new shoes, I discovered, aren't cheap. When I priced new Brooks Cascadias, I found out they weren't selling them for $8 a pair. Not even close. I was looking at around $100 a pair.

But I bought a pair anyway. And you know what, the new ones felt even better than the ones I found at the thrift store. As I kept on training for my first marathon, I graduated to even more expensive shoes, the Brooks Trance 7, which I found online for around $120. I felt bad about not buying them locally. From then on, I've gotten them at local running shops, even though it costs a bit more.

At this point I've resigned myself to spending a little money on my habit. And when you think about it, $300 or $400 a year for shoes isn't such a bad deal after all. It's better than crack and prostitutes, I tell my wife. She smirks.

And I'm still keeping my eyes open for another pair of lightly worn Cascadias in my size. You never know when that same guy is going to get rid of another pair before they're even worn in. This time I'd pay up to $8.99 for them, too. I've come to realize that I'm worth it. Just hope they're in yellow again.