52% intelligent. 9% modest. More monkey than bear.

Thursday, August 09, 2007

(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?

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2 Comments:

  • At 9:00 am, Blogger Lisa Rullsenberg said…

    Well, you made me chuckle in sympathy!

     
  • At 2:46 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Perhaps you should just invest in stock in your favorite shoe company and that way when you continuously have to buy new pairs, you can at least reap the dividends :)

     

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