The Curio

Me too. There's nothing really wrong with the standard iPod headphones, apart from the fact that the little rubberised liner around the outside of each earpiece seems to wear away within a couple of months. The result is a less than comfortable fit and continual slip-out-of-the-earage. Which really annoys me, especially during longer runs.

So I tried some SonyMDREx35Lpb Closed In-Ear Headphones instead. These work well initially, but then they suffer from slippage after about a month of use as the earpiece loses it's in-ear friction, possibly due to rain and/or sweat. They come with a really long cord too, which is supposedly a feature. For me, it's actually a pain because you then have to use the supplied cable-tidy to shorten it. The cable-tidy then tends to bounce around during the run, resulting in even more ear slippage.

I've also noticed that because they're the in-ear design, you can jam them down your ear canal and they tend to stay in place (at least until the ear cup goes smooth), but they really do block out a lot of ambient noise. This is good when sitting on the train, not as good if you're running on busy streets where it's useful to be able to hear whats going on around you.

Now, the answer may simply be not to run with my trusty Shuffle at all. I do this occasionally, usually when I've forgotten to charge it up. In reality though, my iPod is second only to my shoes in terms of importance, so resolving this issue is kind of a big deal. (In a very small, selfish and actually not very important sense.)

So I've decided to try another product altogether.

After a bit of shopping around, I've settled on a different design in the shape of the Sennheiser PMX80SPORT headphones. They're the over-ear-round-the-back-of-the-head kind of design that I've never actually used before. They look promising, but I'll have to wait until Christmas to try them out. 

Failing that, I'll just have to wear a hat pulled down over my ears, all year round.