Women waltzing with their dashing male suitors. But the kind of balls I’ve experienced have very little in common with the dazzling affairs from Disney movies.
Yes, guests are glamorously-dressed, but they don’t maintain an aura of elegance for long. Of course there is dancing. But that dancing better resembles a bunch of soccer hooligans chanting their team’s anthem than a ballroom waltz. And there is much, much more sparkling wine involved than is allowed in a G-rated animation.

I first got a taste for these kinds of events at uni, when some college or organisation would chuck on a ball every few weeks. As a tight-arsed student, my strategy was to make the most of the bar tab before it ran out, stocking up on as many glasses of cheap “champagne” as I could carry.

Apparently, my strategy hasn’t changed.

I’ve now learned that, no matter how mature I get, will always revert back to the stingy, pisswreck of my former self whenever presented with a bar tab scenario. I mean, I have a folder on my laptop containing tax receipts, divvied up into two sub-folders labelled “deductions” and “donations” and yet I still turn into that 18-year-old mess in an asymmetrical dress, terrified of the prospect of having to pay full price for a drink.

I won’t go into details of my night, but suffice to say there was a video of me belting out I Want It That Way in the foyer of a fancy, fancy hotel before interrupting myself by making a loud reference to the state of my big toenail.

To cut a sloppy story sort, I got to bed by 2am for a 6am start.

Amazingly, it only took three alarms to get me up later that morning. I put on shoes. I slopped on sunscreen. I even made it to the meeting point before everyone else on my team.
But I was not in a good way. I smelled like a second-hand gorilla’s armpit. I wore an expression like I’d just had a lobotomy. And my unfiltered public groans and whimpers meant people kept a safe distance from me, as it was clear I could blow at any moment.

I can’t recall many exact details from the run, as I assume it was so traumatic I blocked most of it from memory, but here’s a vague rundown ('run' not being the operative word) of my journey:

The first kilometre - my body was in a state of shock, still not entirely aware what was happening.

Two kilometres in, I was on the Harbour Bridge, distracted by my distain for the iconic piece of infrastructure. I was too busy thinking, “it’s not even that great, but” and judging people for stopping to take selfies to focus on the fact that I was jogging.

By the third kilometre, I became aware of how high-impact stomp dancing in platform heels can be and the effect it has on your joints.

Then I became aware of how unhappy my stomach felt. I could feel my leg muscles angrily protesting in support of my grumbling tum. My body was in full revolt, turning against me.

By the fifth kilometre, I was focused on trying to calm my stomach with the power of my mind, while scanning for a port-a-loo in case a violent ejection took place. I told myself that it was a mind over matter thing, but willpower is often overruled when your body decides to make an emergency evacuation.

In the sixth kilometre I was fuming that despite having run past people coming back the other way for ages, I hadn’t yet looped around. I began to despair at how much further I would have to go just to sit down.

It was around the seventh kilometre when I started asking myself the most important question a journalist can ask: why?
I got over the eight and ninth kilometre marks by sheer delusion.

Then, as the finish line approached, I told myself that I didn’t come all this way to conk out with 400m left to go. So I kept going.

And when I got over the line, I didn’t feel that bad. I actually remember feeling kind of good. By the end, I guess I had sweated out most of my toxins and sins. I was a clean slate – figuratively, of course - I reeked and had weird sticky patches all over my skin.

Then I went and got myself a recovery mojito.