You're welcome.
I wasn't trying to steer you away from a chinese belt - only identify potential issues. My first several belts were of that kind. They're a great way to get started without making a serious investment. You might feel bad if you ended up not liking being belted and end up throwing away a $100 belt. You probably would feel a lot worse throwing away a $400 belt or one even more expensive than that.
The reason why the chinese belts ultimately didn't work for me mostly came from my being a serious runner. I happen to be of tiny stature and my running stride is much larger than would be typical for women of my height, which means I'm putting a lot more stress on my belt than others would. Also, I wore my belts very tight in the beginning and the tighter they are the higher the base or continuous stress on the belt will be. Then add running with an disproportionately longer than average stride. The belt had no chance.
Wendy is also an athlete (swimmer). The movements for swimming are very different than running. I propel myself by putting one foot forward, touching the ground, and gaining traction to pull myself forward, pass the midpoint, then continue to push myself forward until my other foot touches the ground in front of me. The leg movements of swimming are very different and much smaller in range, though not in strength. Wendy's belt also has the advantage that her belt is in the middle of all her swimming motions because she's using her upper body and her lower body to move herself through the water. The middle takes less of a "hit" so to speak. Even though my belt is around my waist just as hers, my belt is more towards the end of my motions because runners mostly use their legs to move, not their arms. Our arms and torsos move for balance, but not power and propulsion. That means my belt is at the end of my movements, not in the middle, thus it takes more abuse with my sport.
I'm not comparing swimming to running as which is better. I'm only trying to suggest that her and my sports are different enough that our belts have different opportunities to be durable, just because the movements are so different. I think this is a big part of why Wendy's belts have lasted much longer than mine every did. I had a lot of problems with the screws in the joints pulling through the holes. Rivets lasted longer but also pulled through eventually. Ultimately, my husband designed a custom, non-adjustable belt out of much thicker stainless, and because of that it won't fall apart no matter how hard I run. The drawback of this belt is because it has absolutely no give whatsoever, it does limit my range of motion a little bit and that in turn has made me slightly slower when I run because it has the effect of shortening my stride slightly. It's also much heavier and carrying around all that weight while running does tire me out a little faster than a chinese belt that's much lighter. Different strokes for different folks, right?
The biggest advantage of a chinese belt are all those joints I'm complaining about. See, all those joints means you can undo the screws and resize it in all sorts of ways, until you get the fit that's best for you and your body. You can even drill intermediate holes between the existing holes to be able to make finer adjustments if you like. You can modify the locking system as Pyra demonstrated on her blog (on this website) and make it more secure if you want.
I wasn't trying to paint the picture that they're terrible belts. They didn't work for me mostly because I'm a serious runner.
molly
