Even though I wrote about my new gear (shoes) just a couple days ago, I have actually owned them for a while. The delay in posting is due to the fact that the blog didn’t actually exist when I first started. I had a visit with Dr. Von Bergen this morning though for various problems and we ended up narrowing it down to a bone being out in my right foot. Luckily I had worn my new running shoes to the visit on purpose and when he tested me on them they were definitely not good for me.

Those shoes are good in that they have good support/control for the heel but apparently have very little for the front of the foot. They were occasionally allowing my foot to tilt towards the outside, which is common for people who underpronate. My arch is standard but I guess my strong tendons (Dr. Von Bergen says I should have played football with my thick foot & ankle tendons) are occasionally making me underpronate. Or maybe I’m just too fat for my foot to support. Heh.

Well no matter what I had to fix the problem. I cruised back over to the running store and explained my predicament. We went through the whole procedure again and after describing which bone was out they realized that the shoe I was wearing had great support/control for the heel, but didn’t have a lot for the front. I guess nobody (myself included) suspected that my relatively normal foot would have an occasional problem with underpronation. We ended up with two shoes that seemed like they might work and I bought both with the intention of heading back over to Dr. Von Bergen and checking to see if either of these new shoes would work. Both had much more cushioning and better support/control for the whole foot.

I had high hopes for finding a solution because the cynical member of the Ted-shoe-crew-version-2 basically called one of the shoes the fat man’s marathon shoe (although not in those exact terms… he was a little nicer with his language). Hey, I know I’m overweight so I’m fine with getting the right shoe for my body frame & weight.

Long story short: The fat man’s marathon shoe works. Hurray! The other one I took to test didn’t, but it didn’t matter. I ended up with the Asics Gel-Numbus 9. I’m excited about trying them out tomorrow. My hope is that it’ll help with my lower leg aches & pains too, which is entirely possible. If my last shoe was shocking my foot enough to make my bones go out of alignment it could very well be giving me problems with my muscles too.