The Ergonomics of Biking Shoes

[OakLeaf]

My theory is that if you are a woman and if you don't know if you have wide feet by the time you are an adult, then you don't. You would know if you spent your life searching for shoes that didn't hurt your feet something awful! (Men may be more clueless since men's shoes trend wider anyway - and pointy toes are not in fashion for them either).

Well, I gotta disagree with that. Maybe it's just the way I grew up ... but I honestly never knew shoes were actually supposed to fit my feet until about five years ago, and I'm 53. The machines (that somebody said the name of them and I'm blanking on it now ) don't tell the whole story with my feet, for one; some quack doctor put me in orthopedic shoes when I was six, for another, pretty much precluding my parents or shoe salespeople from even looking for shoes that fit, even supposing there were any; and last, decades of wearing shoes that were too small squeezed my bones together and my toes under, so I wear even wider shoes now than I did when I first started wearing shoes that fit. As I said in the other thread, the last pair I bought were men's 4E and I still had to buy a size too long so as not to aggravate my ingrown toenails and tailor's bunion, so there's no ambiguity about whether my feet are wide or not!

I still find myself, way more often than I'd like, having to argue with a shoe salesperson trying to put me in shoes that are too narrow. Drives me crazy.


I also don't find men's shoes to have less pointy toe boxes than women's, in the athletic shoes I've tried on and seen. As far as dress shoes, men's are WAY pointy, while women can sometimes wear open toed shoes.

[GLC1968]

So did you grow up thinking that shoes were supposed to hurt? How does that happen?

I knew with my very, very first pair of 'school shoes' (we got one new pair of nice shoes at the start of every school year) that I was not like other girls. Every single pair I tried hurt my feet something awful and I was always fighting blisters. It blows my mind that anyone with feet wider than mine could go so long just enduring the pain! Even when I was a kid, I knew that certain brands were better for me than others. The super cute mary janes I wanted from Sears (yes, Sears!) were not going to happen because they were too narrow but I had good luck with other brands (even though no one made a fashionable 'wide' width shoe for women/girls back then).

Oh and I didn't mean that men's shoes don't come pointy (and I wasn't thinking about athletic shoes at all), I meant that they could get away with a boxy toe shape and still look high fashion. They had options - women typically don't as longer and leaner is almost always the trend (and higher - don't get me started on heels!). Plus, men's shoes have been coming in widths for a hell of a lot longer than women's shoes have....

Open toed shoes don't solve the wide foot problem though. In fact, they are worse because the foot can rub on more edges than in a closed toe shoe. It guess it makes sense for someone who is wide purely due to toes, but I have a wide forefoot, too. Open toed shoes are pretty much hell for me.

I will say that the early 90's when big, boxy shoes were in were a JOY for me in terms of shoe buying! I had quite a few, big, clunky styles of shoes that were comfortable for standing all day because the toes were either squared off or rounded and the heels were fairly low and thick. I'm still hanging on to one of my favorite pair of shoes from back then in the hopes they come back in style some day!