New shoes

Did­n’t run today at all. Instead, I made a trip across town to On The Run, a shoe store that spe­cial­izes in run­ners footwear. The store came rec­om­mend­ed by friends who run and I had decid­ed it was time to at least attempt to take bet­ter care of my feet.

Well, the sales­guy took good care of me. He actu­al­ly had real empir­i­cal­ly-testable-and-answer­able ques­tions for me about the fit. Usu­al­ly the process of try­ing on shoes is just “how does that feel?” He also seemed to actu­al­ly know a lot about what he was sell­ing. A great retail expe­ri­ence, in my opin­ion, which is some­thing that gets hard­er and hard­er to find as cap­i­tal­ism dri­ves our soci­ety ever onward toward mediocrity.

I must have tried on nine pairs of shoes, and each time the sales­guy explained what was dif­fer­ent and why, he’d select­ed this brand or that mod­el. Appar­ent­ly I have very wom­an­ly feet, with a nar­row­er heel in rela­tion to my toe­sec­tion. Huh. So almost all of the shoes I tried gave some slip in the heel.

The only shoe we tried that was com­fort­able with­out my heels slip­ping up off the sole were the ones I came home with: Saucony Grid Omni 3 CRM Ulti­mates. There was one prob­lem with them: the toe­box is roomy enough that the mate­r­i­al folds over on one spot and the reflec­tor kind of pokes at the spot on the inside right behind my big toe. He fixed this by putting pads on the insides of the shoes, which made a big dif­fer­ence. It elim­i­nat­ed the prob­lem entire­ly on the right side, but odd­ly enough, it still rubbed just a lit­tle on my left foot. It was minor enough that I bought the shoes con­fi­dent that I could adjust the pads fur­ther to elim­i­nate the problem.

I got home tonight, took my shoes and socks off and dis­cov­ered why I could­n’t fix the prob­lem on the left. I’d for­got­ten that Fri­day morn­ing Ozzy got a lit­tle too ram­bunc­tious play­ing with my foot and left me with a two-inch gash that will like­ly leave a scar vis­i­ble for years to come. Right on the spot where I was feel­ing the shoe rub. Which explains a lot. The right foot was fixed with the pad, but that very spot on my left foot has a wound that stings when pres­sure is applied to it. Duuuuuhhhhh!!!!

Now I feel guilty for mak­ing that guy spend so much time read­just­ing the pads and the tight­ness of the laces and walk­ing around, and a lit­tle stu­pid for for­get­ting that that spot was going to be sen­si­tive before head­ing to the shoe store.

Tomor­row I’d like to try run­ning on them. Yay!

Wicked Game—H.I.M. (His Infer­nal Majesty)