“You should wear skirts more. You look really good in skirts.” – Harry in “When Harry Met Sally."

The latest fad in running gear for women is – I swear it’s true – skirts . And for the life of me, I don’t understand it.

Women I’ve talked to – trail-running, ultra-running women – say running in a skirt makes them feel pretty and feminine during what is a distinctly un-pretty and unfeminine sport.

Okay. Here’s the thing. An ultra-run is at least 50 kilometers on trail through some pretty gnarly backcountry. I’ve dodged snakes, poison oak and once a marauding horse. I’ve scaled fallen trees, forded streams and been up to my ankles in mud. I routinely pick bugs out of my teeth and gravel out of my cuts and scrapes. I get very, very dirty. And I sweat. A lot. After a really good run, I am not fit to be near humans. For one thing, I smell awful. And that’s just for starters.

So how, exactly, is that skirt going to help me out? Like maybe you won’t notice the gnats stuck to my neck, drowning in pools of my sweat, due to the entrancing nature of my hemline? Perhaps my eau de gym sock will go unperceived?

If skirts really possessed this magical power, I’d wear them all the time. Bathe? Comb my hair? What for? I’m wearing a skirt! Skirt trumps hygiene!

And the other thing – the quasi-psychological/political/social thing – is that when I’m sprinting up the side of a mountain, passing a large portion of the men doing the same course, I don’t give a shit how feminine I look. If ever there was a moment when it shouldn’t matter what I’m wearing, it’s then. And at the end of the race, when the overall results are posted, men and women listed together, there is no column for well dressed. There is, however, one for “got your ass kicked by a girl.”