I’ve been wearing footwear of the wrong size, material, and shape for as long as I can remember, certainly at least 20 years.
Only recently have I fixed this, and I come with great tidings: if you, too, hate wearing shoes, and the industrial revolution and its consequences, it is possible to be cured of at least one of these ailments.
The problem is three-shaped, and is named as follows: wrong size, wrong material, and wrong shape.
1. Wrong size
My algorithm for buying shoes was roughly this:
Be somewhere where there’s a shoe store nearby, like a mall, for an unrelated reason.
Remember that I should probably get new shoes.
Go inside.
First filter: find the maximum size the store sells.
That size is EU 46, maybe 46 and 2⁄3, if I’m lucky 47.
Second filter: find a decently good-looking shoe that’s of the maximum size.
Buy those shoes.
Be in pain for a year or two.
I would just get the largest shoe, which wasn’t large enough, and call it a day.
Dear reader, it is at this point that you might be asking yourself: “is this person completely retarded?”
That is indeed a fair question, and I have oft asked myself that. Indeed, my own wife has asked me that exact question when I divulged this information to her.
We shall set aside the questions of how mentally undeveloped I am for now, and temporarily conclude that it is possible to be a high-functioning adult (with all of the apparent markers of success: a good job, good relations with friends and family, hobbies, aspirations, hopes); and yet – to spend years wearing shoes that don’t fit.
2. Wrong material
Wowsers! It seems that you have developed an anoxic bacteria-forming colony wrapped around your feet! Impressive!
I would inevitably just get black Adidas (Sambas, or a similar model), because I’m Slavic and this is my idea of a good looking shoe:
I don’t know if it’s just me, or if everyone has very very sweaty feet but they just hide it better, but my feet sweat, a lot, and if I walk a lot, which I do, this sweat permeates the inside of this sneaker, and settles there, and it just starts smelling bad.
I’ve tried washing the shoes, machine washing the shoes, putting foot powder on my feet, putting foot powder inside the shoes, drying out the shoes immediately after wearing them, placing little bags of coffee to absorb the smell inside, using foot deodorant, and so on, and so forth. I’m not going to say I tried it all, but I tried many things. And yet, the stench perseveres.
Then, I asked Claude, and was enlightened.
He very politely suggested just getting a shoe that has that net-like breathable material, instead of the watertight encapsulation I placed around my feet.
Who would’ve thunk that air go in foot dry out?!
3. Wrong shape
Finally, the biggest of the three: the SHAPE.
Feet are not uniformly narrow for most people, or aren’t narrow at all.
Some manufacturers provide a “wide” fit for their models, but that also addresses only the second aspect: being narrow at all. What if your feet are, well, foot-shaped?
Feet are usually narrow at the heel, widening towards the toes, and the toes, are wide. Very wide, in fact! So the wide models are just… uniformly wide, which is not what we need. Read more about the difference here.
Enter: wide-toebox shoes, rightly-called foot-shaped shoes.
These are shoes that follow the natural shape of your foot, and don’t try to cram it into a narrowing, symmetric, unnatural, albeit good-looking, shape.
If your toes cannot spread out fully inside your shoe, your shoe is too narrow at the top, and Big Shoe is robbing you of your superior hominid biomechanics.
Do yourself a favor, go buy a pair of cheap (~40 euros or so) wide toebox shoes, and try them on. It is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, liberating. I feel like I am wearing something comfortable for the first time in many, many years. I don’t know if everyone else just accepts suffering, or people are actually comfortable in their shoes, but I know that I always had a pain, or discomfort, that I would push into the background mentally, and forget about it. It’s good not to have to do this anymore.
Addendum: why is it possible to be in pain and forget about it?
All of this leads me to the next logical question: if I spent twenty years or so in constant mild-to-severe discomfort, what other discomfort am I accepting as a given?
And is everyone else in the same constant discomfort, and they just haven’t escaped the Matrix yet?
There are many questions that my wide, smelly feet have brought before my eyes, but I do not have all the answers yet.
PSA to those with flat or otherwise imperfect feet:
I finally got custom-made orthotics made, and they’re very different / way more correction than I expected compared to off-the-shelf orthotics, in a good way. Highly recommended!
Same here. I will never wear high-heels or other uncomfortable shoes after putting my custom-made orthotics in a pair of asics kayano 29.
I see you are wandering into the territory of barefoot shoes! If you want to do more reading around it, the term “barefoot shoe” should send you to the right places. Turns out our feet are actually quite excellent at being feet, and all we really need is some protection from sharp stuff + insulation +/- weatherproofing, and we’re good.
If you enjoy wide toebox shoes, you might even like zero drop shoes; I know that all my knee pains and sprained ankles disappeared like magic once I switched to feet-shaped, zero-drop, thin sole shoes. Sure, it was a bit uncomfortable walking “barefoot” at first, but my sole and foot/ankle/calf muscles adapted within a week or so. Never looking back!
Also worth mentioning that I try actually walking barefoot (as in unshod, not in barefoot shoes) as often as possible, and did so before switching to barefoot shoes, so ymmv.
Yeah, I was looking into barefoot shoes even before and the current shoes (the ones I linked) are sold as “barefoot” shoes. Zero drop ftw. But in my experience, the drop itself was secondary to the wide toebox factor.
Of course, actually walking without any shoes is superior, and I try to practice it whenever possible.
I still haven’t solved the problem of boots. Like if it’s winter, rainy, muddy—I don’t want to walk barefoot or in a classic breathable “barefoot” shoe. This is something I need to look into.
Note that there is a wide spectrum of “barefoot” shoes. See if you can actually scrunch them into a ball in your hand. If you can’t, try some that allow this. Big difference.
There are also “barefoot” boots. Look at Vivo Barefoot for example.
But where? I always have a problem finding shoes with a toe-to-heel width ratio to match my feet, but I’ve never seen anything advertised for that feature. From experience I’ve learned a few brands that are more likely to be suitable, and a few that aren’t even worth picking off the shelf (one of which is Adidas), but I can spend a day going to half a dozen shoe shops (online is out of the question) and find nothing.
I have never seen wide toebox shoes in a physical shoe shop.
And I also had a policy of never buying shoes online because it’s usually garbage and doesn’t fit me well.
But I gave these a shot: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/dp/B0F4XJN7HC
And it has been worth it. Very wide at the top, sufficiently narrow at the heel. I see that there are some other models on Amazon, and also on AliExpress.
Given that it’s relatively cheap, I think it’s a good bet, it has been for me. For higher quality, there are also other online shops like BeLenka and some others, but this cheap Chinese shoe has been a 9⁄10 purchase these last couple of months. Therefore, I’ve canceled my policy of never buying shoes online.
They’re more expensive than 40 euros, but I found wide toebox running shoes at REI.
When I look at the pointy-shaped shoes in shop, I wonder: does anyone actually have feet like that?
Or are people just suffering in the name of fashion? Or do they buy shoes a few numbers larger and keep the pointy end empty?
Funny thing is, even if you buy them larger, they are still insufficiently wide. Toes spread out pretty wide, at least mine do.
I don’t know what it is, it’s absurd to me that something like a shoe, something that almost everyone in the world uses, is mostly done wrong.
One word: Birkenstocks