Nice Skate Shoes

[fenchurch]

I just bought new shoes!! Squee!!

And those who have known me for any length of time realize exactly how weird it is for me to squee over shoes. For the most part, I don't wear them. At all. I've got one pair of shoes and a couple of different types of "slip ons" that I use for times when they're required, but otherwise, I prefer to leave my feet free.

Beyond the personal preference aspects (which I blame in large part on a mother who spent most of her childhood in the islands and didn't see why I should wear shoes -- especially when we were living in the islands during *my* childhood), I have funky feet. They're wide from not wearing shoes (which is why I own no women's shoes -- apparently I missed out on the ritual footbinding that would have made my feet elfin enough to fit into women's shoes). I had a fairly serious injury to my right ankle when I was 11... that then went through a series of misdiagnoses from various military doctors. When I was 14, the doctors at Shriner's Hospital finally figured it out... I'd essentially torn all the ligaments and tendons around my ankle and it had healed wrong. End result: I wore a leg brace and walked with crutches/canes until I was about 22.

At that point I discovered that if I didn't wear shoes, I generally didn't have any problem with pain in my ankle. Near as we could tell, when I wear regular shoes with the interior molded to the "shape of the foot" it tries to push my foot in a direction it no longer goes... and I sprain my ankle (that may not sound too horrible, but just imagine if every single time you wore shoes, you sprained your ankle... over and over and over again).

So, add up wide feet with an injury that requires me to find shoes with as little internal molding as possible and the fact that I have two VERY different sized feet (in women's, I wear an 8 on one foot and a 10 on the other -- for some reason, in men's it varies a lot more depending on the shoe), and it can be tortuously difficult to find shoes that work. A few years back, I discovered Nice Skate Shoes (NSS) and fell in love -- they're perfect... wide and flat. My last pair are on their last leg (no pun intended) and I've been scouring local shoe and sporting goods stores for more NSS shoes... with absolutely no luck.

Then tonight we stopped by our local Fred Meyer (sort of a grocery/department store) to pick up a copy of LEGO Indiana Jones and I dashed into the shoe section to look at their selection of men's sandals... when rackham said "Hey, what was that brand of shoes you've been looking for?" And there, behind me, was an entire aisle of NSS shoes. Yes, after all this time of searching, I found them at my local grocery store. For a pretty decent price, too (the only thing that would have been better is if they'd been Buy One, Get One Free). I may have even done the Dance of Joy in the aisle when I saw them, too.

I can't wait to start breaking them in! (Once again, embrace the weirdness of that statement.)

Comments

[jedihealer.livejournal.com]

My son loves these shoes too, but then again, he does skate.

Glad you found something that works on your feet.