💾 Archived View for juliette.zone › gemlog › minimalist-shoes.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 09:34:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Posted on 2024-12-05
My mother-in-law has been recommending these inexpensive minimalist shoes she's been wearing to half of Quebec, and she managed to convince me to give them a try. For the past few months, I've worn the shoes I bought nearly every day and have found them incredibly confortable after a short adjustment period. I did feel like I needed to pay more attention to the forces I was subjecting my feet to and the muscles I needed to use than I ever had before, which was an odd feeling, but it quickly felt fun and then perfectly comfortable.
We got some snow here yesterday so I borrowed a pair of boots from my partner to run out in for a quick errand. I really had not appreciated the scale of how my walking technique adjusted to minimalist footwear until putting these boots on. First, I had gotten used to just feeling everything below my feet. Cracks in the sidewalk and pebbles were all readily apparent, and losing that sense of the world around me was odd. Second, I found that I was lengthening my stride and putting a lot more force on my heel now that there was cushioning for the impact. It felt fine, and I assume is how I was walking before the footwear change, but in only a couple months I had become accustomed to landing closer to my midfoot and distributing that pressure quickly to avoid too much of a shock.
Unfortunately I haven't been jogging much since buying the shoes so I don't have much of a comparison for anything but walking. Jogging is still a bit difficult since I'm far from practiced with a fore- or midfoot strike. Maybe I'll update when I do a bit more of that.