I Ran 4 kilometres in my 18th Century Stays

I have not even reached three kilometers. I run. Oh, I can't speak. My hands are shaking. Oh my gosh. I have no idea what happened there. I haven't even run three kilometers. That isn't long at all and I feel like I'm going to collapse. Hello and welcome to this video. I hope you're doing very well today because in this video we're going to talk about stays and corsets. Most stays. I think we all are very interested and fascinated by those garments. I mean they were obvious everyday garments that women centuries after centuries wore every single day and yet they feel so incredibly foreign for the modern person. I mean that structure and that shape aren't really found in our clothing today so it doesn't really come as a surprise that those garments terrifies us and confuses us today and therefore it isn't very strange that myths and preconceptions and critical thoughts about these garments have been flying around the last hundred years. We don't really understand them and I know that you have heard of these statements and myths and I think you know by now that they aren't really true. I have been planning to do this video for quite a long time and for some reasons I haven't been able to do that and during that time Instagram, Facebook and YouTube have just exploded of videos and pictures when people are wearing corsets and stays and they're doing exercise, they're doing physical things and also living their everyday life with a corset and stays and it works perfectly well. That idea that I had before was that I could wear my, not corset because I have none, but my pair of stays during an ordinary day. But then I realized that that wouldn't been really interesting for you nor for me because you've seen it before and I've done that before. So for those who don't know that already, I participated in a musical this spring and my 18th century stays were a part of my stage costume which meant that I wore those during a couple of weeks every day. We trained and rehearsed in them, we danced, we sang, we acted and also then during the musical on stage in those bright lights. I wore my stays. I wore them every day. I walked in malls, I bought food, I ate food, I ran around, I played, I laughed, I went to the bathroom, you know, I lived the ordinary life in my stays and it worked really really well. There were though some things that I thought was different but to really be able to understand that in full I want to run four kilometers in my 18th century stays. So that is what I'm going to do in this video which is quite exciting. I haven't done that before, I have danced two hours on a stage but I haven't run four kilometers in them so I have no idea how this will go. So the plan is to run first four kilometers without my stays just as something to compare with and then it's time to put on the stays and then run the same distance but in the dead gardens. So I think it's time to change now and then get out in the forest and run. Let's do this! Okay, first kilometer completed and I don't think I said how I will like rate this so after every kilometer I'm going to rate it from one to ten, you know, depending on how I feel and how out of breath I feel and now it's actually quite okay. Oh sorry, I'm not going to do it, um I'm not going to stop. I would say three or maybe four, no three. I'm halfway through and it feels like four. So now four kilometers are complete so the last kilometer was quite heavy and I'm actually going to give it a seven but otherwise it felt quite normal as it usually does. So to summarize I got three, four, five and seven and I'm quite pleased with that. Good morning! Today we're going to run the second time and this time I'm going to do it with these. So here they are, my stays. You can see that they are very well worn though they have been lying in a box for six months so I haven't worn them since musical but you can still see that they are like shaped after my waist and also the back. I think it's very interesting to see and I haven't worn them since May so it shall be fun to put them on again and see if they fit. So the modern workout clothes are on. I could of course run in my 18th century costume but that would have been... I don't think the stays would have been the biggest problem there, probably the skirts and all the layers and I also have a t-shirt on because I don't want the stays next to my skin especially not if I'm doing physical exercise and maybe one of these in the history too. Therefore they had shifts as I expected. When you wear stays during a long period you can always continuously lace it down and also your body gets used to them so when I wore them and I wore them for a couple of weeks I was so used to them that I didn't really feel them but now I do and also feels like this has jumped off in a way. So here they are. My stays. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to run in them now when they are this tight. So I remember that the hardest thing when doing this musical was the warm-up because then we had to do stretch stuff and you know certain things are okay with stays like you can reach the floor for example. I mean put on shoes wasn't a problem for me but the sit-ups were a completely different story. Will I be able to do them now? I mean the problem with stays is that you compress your muscles in your stomach for example so I couldn't do sit-ups but if you have stays or a corset I challenge you to try. I mean you can't really... Am I stupid now? What shall we do, Svea? Do you want to cheer on me? Oh, cat hair. Okay. I can't get up. Oh my gosh. I'm serious. I can't get up. Yeah, thank you for the butt in my head. Thank you. You know I can't get access to my muscles here. I can't hold me up. Did I do it? I feel that I can't get a nice grip. I think it's rather me than the stays that we should blame. Yeah. Though I hadn't signed up for doing sit-ups. That's not my real challenge today. Four kilometers. Here I come. So I brought this with me just because I thought it was so cold and also because my neighbors all already think that I'm totally crazy and I don't want them to find another reason to think that. So I'm going to run exactly the same round. Yeah, I think you understand. I'm going to run exactly the same four kilometer distance thing and I'm going to rate it for one to ten this time as well. Let's go then. One kilometer done. I feel a bit more breathless than last time. Not because I want to breathe down here at my stomach. I can't. So my breathing has moved upwards. So I breathe here instead which is not ideal. But to be honest it works really really well. I'm quite surprised actually. One thing that troubles me a bit is that it's very hot and the stays are so tight that I don't really get any air to this area. So it feels a bit sticky and uncomfortable. So I'll give this a four. Point reached and it feels fine. It started to rain so now it feels less fine. I feel a bit around my waist. I feel that this side is digging a bit but I've felt that before so I'm not surprised. Why am I stopping? So I'm going to give this a five. I have not even reached three kilometers. I run. Oh I can't speak. My hands are shaking. Oh my gosh. I have no idea what happened there. I ran up for a hill and as soon as I wanted to start breathing bigger breaths my stays just stopped those. I could just feel my lungs hitting the inside of the stays every time I wanted to breathe. I haven't even run three kilometers. That isn't long at all and I feel like I'm going to collapse. Can I give this an eight? Is that too much? I honestly don't think so. Can you just stop? I don't want... Four kilometers are reached and I will soon be home. The last kilometer felt better than the third one. I don't know what happened there. I could in a way find some way where my lungs and my stays wanted to cooperate which was great for me anyway. But I'm heading home now and I'm not going to give this more than an eight or maybe eight and a half. Eight and a half. Yeah the last kilometer will have that. I think when I started this video I wanted to have an answer of how it would have been to run in stays for a couple of kilometers. And I think I've come up with an answer. Of course it's hard to know when you're only one person and it could be so much other things that matters more than just the stays. And I mean the first two kilometers nearly felt like the two I ran without my stays. They worked really really well. And then the third kilometer came and everything went wrong. I don't understand what happened there. I think it could be a combination of me running faster because I have to do that when I'm close to reaching my goal. And the hill of course. But also I think my body got quite scared. I think it became a shock for it that it couldn't breathe properly. So I think my body got a bit scared when it tried to take those big breaths that was acquired to get up for the hill. Every time my lungs wanted to expand it just got stopped by And that was what I think made me a bit shocked almost. So what worked well then? My posture was amazing. Often when I run I start to, you know, my body gets tired and I want to like move. But with my stays I was just kept upright the whole time. And as I said before the stays was the best sports bra I've ever tried. And I just felt more compact and that feeling was very very great to have. The things that didn't work that well with stays was that the right side of my stays was digging into my waist in a quite uncomfortable way. When one is running you really really feel like the two sides like digging into the waist. But I don't think that's a general thing. I just think that's some failure during the construction of them. And you remember that I was trying to sit up before? The thing was that because your core gets so compressed you loses the strength there. So I felt that my muscles around this area they became quite weak. Oh you don't want to join! And that made my legs feel a bit odd. I couldn't really find the strength in them and I couldn't really take big steps when I was running. And also the breathing. Except for the third kilometer the breathing went really really well. But I could of course feel that I took more breaths and smaller breaths. Because I couldn't really get enough air. And because the breathing was moved upwards. It's never good to breathe up here. You should always keep it as far down as possible. And of course there were some flaws with this experiment. I don't think the ordinary woman in the 18th century went out to run four kilometers on a daily basis. And I don't think that I was the best person to do this experiment. And also that when a woman was doing hard physical labor they probably unlaced, they tightened, they untightened the stays to be able to to do that work. But I didn't during this. Just because I wanted to see how it was to have them quite tightly laced during the whole time. So one must keep that in mind as well. The rain made me so cold and so wet. I think I'm going to take a shower now. But anyway I thought this video and experiment was a very very fun, interesting and eye-opening one. And I really really hope you thought so as well. If you did that please let me know. And otherwise I hope I'll see you very very soon.