Adventures in Orthopedics

It's starting to look pretty sharp. Just subtract all the gray and white stuff - I'll clean that up later - and it is starting to look like a retreaded shoe.

(left view right view of a shoe. It's flush on the bottom).

This is after I took a test walk in them yesterday morning and decided what felt good and what didn't feel good. I'm trying to be orthopedically minded. If I am going to spend on this time on retreading them I don't want my shoes to give me and musculoskeletal issues. Ideally these shoes would improve my quality of life by not hurting my feet. Maybe I'm a potter asking a carpenter to make a table lamp; I'll just try my best.

I found that I need a lot of support for the outside and inside of my feet. My left foot pronates a little but I think I can adjust this with some rubber redistribution. While being conscious of my foot's form and shoe function I felt like there was a lot of potential to get this right and feel better.

These shoes will never win a beauty contest but I also didn't make these shoes to win a beauty contest. If I can work in them and forget about my feet that would be the ideal. If I can work/walk/run in them and also improve my form which in turn will ameliorate my aches and pains - well that's the gold standard. If I can work/walk/run in them, improve my form, and also smash a marathon time by using these shoes well that is the moon.

I saw something online about the pair of shoes that helped Kelvin Kiptum smash the marathon world records - the Nike's were designed to return most of the energy from the ground into forward momentum. You can read that how you want, I read that to mean that there was a high back heel and less flex in the toe. If I want to keep as much energy from a foot fall I think I should connect the toe to the heel, that way and forward roll will raise the whole shoe/foot instead of just flexing front toe. We will see and I will experiment.

This is my "workshop". It's a little too chaotic for my liking, but as I don't really have any space this is what I have and I'll make it work.

As an aside I made that white chair and it's companion chair like 15 years ago. It's still standing and does everything you want a chair to do functionally. I guess it's appropriate that my projects intersect. By the way I built the chair, I did not design the chair. I think the design is too simple, boxy and doesn't taper to the human form well enough - but I digress.

Update: After wearing my shoes for probably like a week or so I decided to buy a pair of new shoes. Sometimes it's worth making life harder for yourself sometimes you gotta know when to call it.

Funny shoe store story:

I walk in wearing my retreaded shoes.

Store lady: "How can I help you?"

Me looking around the walls at all the shoes: "Do you have any shoes here?" A store patron behind her with her feller who's trying on shoes smiles big noticing that I'm a goofy guy.

"Yes. How can I help you?" I told the lady that I wanted something more durable than Hokas. She brought out like 4 boxes of brooks shoes and I said: "Would you be upset if I went with the first pair I tried on?"

"Uh. No!"

And just like that I enjoy walking again.