Opinion: The alternative to exercising in lycra is a sore bum and chafed thighs so give middle-aged blokes a break The emergence of the MAMIL has given critics a new target. UNLESS you have been living on an uncharted desert isle with Elvis and Harold Holt, you will have noticed the growing phenomenon in the streets, cafes and pubs of suburbia, the MAMIL. MAMIL stands for Middle-Aged Man In Lycra and is generally uttered in the disparaging tone of voice that people in the IT industry reserve for consumers. In other words, it is not a complement. Indeed, the term is used by non-MAMILS, by which I mean women, to convey the concept that men of a certain age and weight should have the good taste to refrain from wearing lycra in public. In fact, they should probably have the common decency to stay at home with the curtains drawn until such time as they are in their 70s and can get away with any fashion choice, including wearing shorts up to their armpits. This is a sexist attitude, after all, no woman would be offended if Brad Pitt and Channing Tatum, wearing lycra bodysuits, wandered into her coffee shop. It's an attitude the equivalent of men walking down the mall sporting "Ban Fat Chicks" T-shirts. I wish, just this once, I possessed the innate narrowness of mind and depth of insecurity that drives your average radical feminist. I could summon their confected outrage and insensible rants when confronted with overt sexism, but I just can't, mildly offended is all I can bring myself to be. The underlying sentiment here is that if you don't look like an athlete, you should not exercise in public. This is something I can't allow to gain traction. I like to run but I do not look like an athlete, unless you count participants in pie-eating contests as athletes. I could probably also pass for a golfer or a darts player but, since these pursuits demand the same overall athletic ability as possessed by your average jellyfish, this doesn't help me. You may have seen me running about the place. Although, given that I move at the average speed of continental drift, you may not have noticed I was moving. You may have mistaken me for a statue cast by an artist with poor taste, poor eyesight or an unfortunate combination of both. My style of running is not so much Usain Bolt or Emil Zatopek as it is fat man stumbling down a hill. It is indeed downhill that I look my best, striding out like a thoroughbred racehorse might if it had three legs and one of them was shorter than the other two. Uphill I tend to look like the understandably less-well-known little engine that couldn't. I find myself being thankful for the fact that I was not born during the ice age, because I would probably have been run over by a glacier. I am not blessed with the thighs, or anything else, of Matt Shirvington, whose appearance in lycra would, I suspect, make most women ecstatic, and so, when I run, I need to account for chafing, hence the lycra. I have heard some people suggest that shorts and undies would do for running. This is the sort of comment you expect from people who have never deliberately exercised in their lives and for whom the most physically demanding task on any given day is adding friends on Facebook. Ask anyone who has run somewhere, however, and they will tell you that you may as well take a sheet of sandpaper to your genitalia. I can't see where, outside of an English boarding school, this would be popular, but it sure doesn't help on a run. So how about giving us middle-aged exercisers a break? Whether cycling or running, we are just trying to get fit, or at least less fat, without rubbing holes in our inner thighs or bruising our backsides. If that happens, we might have to accompany our wives on shopping trips and I don't think the sisterhood would be thankful for that turn of events. Shane Budden is a slightly pudgy Brisbane lawyer and freelance writer.