(letting in water)

I am incredibly hard-wearing on my shoes.

I'm an overpronator. This means that the outside of my heel strikes the ground hard and then my foot rolls inwards as I take each step. I'm 1m 98cm tall and I weigh something around 86kg. With every step I take, all this mass is magnified and forced down through my spine, through my legs and feet and out into the ground. This means that I place a lot of strain on my joints when I go running (unless I buy trainers with the right kind of support), and it also means that I go through shoes like nobody's business. I got a pair of shoes re-heeled a couple of months ago, and within three weeks, the outside edge of my heel was worn down so much that I needed to take them back to be done again. I like my shoes, but this was going to get really boring really quickly. More drastic action was required. I was offered harder wearing soles, but I decided to go nuclear: this time, I opted for quarter-steels, where the cobbler inserts a bit of metal into the heel to slow down the wearing process. It might sound drastic, but it certainly works. It does have it's downsides though..... I now sound utterly ridiculous as I clippity-clop down the street. As well as sounding like a berk, it's a noise that reminds me of being at school, where quite a few public school numpties (including me, it has to be said) had this done to their (new) shoes just because they liked the way it sounded. I suppose, to a certain ear, that clipping and clopping could sound vaguely patrician. Whatever. I don't really like it much any more, and it makes me feel terribly conspicuous. But y'know, what can I do? What choice do I have?

So anyway. I had the quarter-steel put in and put up with the ridiculous noise accompanying every step and the imagined stares, safe in the knowledge that at least I would no longer have to keep popping back to the cobblers every five minutes.

....well, except that no more than two weeks later I spotted holes in soles of both feet.

*sigh*

On the bright side, it's finally stopped raining, so at least my feet aren't getting wet.

The glass is always half full around here.

I'm telling you about my shoe-wear issues. Does it get any better than this?