with a whimper

With the inevitability of many cost-cutting exercises my right-hand Woolworths Value shoelace snapped at the eyelet this morning after barely two months' wear; I won't be buying any shoelaces from there again. Besides being cheap and brown they also had the advantage of being about the right length to be easily-pullable-tight without leaving too much spare to flap around and catch in a crank, even when lengthened slightly by not looping round the two lowest holes in order to provide less width-constriction across the foot-beam. Unfortunately they were made of little more than weak and short-lived string. The shortest available reasonable-strength replacements always tend to be slightly too long but I'm wary about shortening them in case they need to be re-threaded and neither frayed ends nor globs of Sellotape are particularly well-designed to be inserted through a narrow eyelet. One pair of trainers a few years ago came with very thin elasticated laces instead of anything functional though I gave them a try only for them both to snap during the first couple of miles of mild trotting. I occasionally try and make them last longer by rotating them or inverting them when any particular bit looks like it's getting too warn from repetitive friction against a particular portion of shoe though the action of unthreading them sometimes seems particularly traumatic, especially given the strange construction of a floppy outer weave and strong but thin central core where the outer material easily bunches and frets against the eyelet whilst being re-threaded. Still, laces that are too strong could be as bad; when unsuccessfully attempting to switch brands back in the spring I was only lightly tightening a testing-pair in Millets when the topmost D-ring pinged off excitedly into a far corner of the shop.