I want to start running, but since G-Unit can hardly take two steps unsupported, this isn’t a task I can attempt without significant engineering.  So begins my quest for the perfect sports bra.

With a sympathetic friend for back-up (also a runner, also busty), I hit the streets of Brighton this morning optimistic that, in 2010, the technology to stop a pair of 30G breasts knocking their owner out mid-jog must exist in abundance.

We made a beeline for a 30G Shock Absorber.  I’d read so many good reviews about its gravity-defying support (and its breath-defying tightness) that I was fairly confident I was going to strike lucky first time.  I was disappointed.  Though they weren’t blackening my eyes, my boobs were bouncing significantly and the bra itself didn’t feel like it was giving me much support.  We needed to go tighter.

Debenhams didn’t have the 28 back so we marched to Bravissimo, where the 28 refused to come even close to doing up.  So I tried another 30G, just in case; and though I was still bouncing merrily the back was noticeably tighter than the one I’d tried on ten minutes before.  In fact, over the course of the expedition I ended up trying on three identical 30G Shock Absorbers and none of them fit me in the same way.  As if sports bra shopping wasn’t difficult enough.

Closest to the mark was a Freya Active (above) in a 28G.  Having gone down a back size the cups were slightly too small, but my boobs moved much less than in the Shock Absorber and I preferred having them separated.  (Note, this was the underwired one. I am sorry Freya: in all other respects I love you like a sister, but the perpendicular cone thing that happened to my boobs in the wireless one was just weird.) I thought we’d triumphed, until I discovered that Freya start their Active GG cups at their 30 back…  I could have cried.

Trawling through more shops only uncovered more Shock Absorbers, none of them right.  And that was it.  Brighton – a city with its own marathon – utterly exhausted of sports bra possibilities in under an hour. Shrugging off suspicions that I was in possession of a pair of especially unruly and irrepressible breasts, I abandoned the search and weighed up my options.  Do I compromise with an almost-right fit?  Or do I, as my friend has, resort to running with two too small bras on to keep the ladies firmly in place?  Is the perfect sports bra an impossible dream, or have I just been looking in the wrong places?

The quest continues…