stopped shoe shopping

Minimalist/barefoot running shoes have been disappearing from the stores in favor of well-padded zero-drop shoes. I'm pretty sure that's because people in general like to run on pavement, and pavement is hard, plus the fact that some people's feet really don't adapt well to minimal support.

I am not one of those people. I like to run behind my subdivision -- an area covered in sandy washes -- and I pretty much hate wearing shoes. Most shoes aren't wide enough anyway, and I have really short toes, and no shoe company I've found caters to that. Why would they?

So I made essentially a sock with a homemade insole, glued onto a 4 mm sole, shored up with paracord with its insides pulled out:

I'll cut the laces sticking out the back once I'm sure the tension is right, but that's probably mostly the finished product -- a floppy sole that's good in the sand and enough of an upper to keep out most of the cactus spines.

In related news, you can make more flat insoles than you could probably ever need for about $30 including shipping if you get a sheet of 1/8" p-cell foam. I used spray adhesive to attach some thin, stretch nylon I had lying around on the top so I wouldn't have to run around on plastic, but if you wear socks, you're already finished when they're cut out.

Similarly related:

You can see my running shoes' roots in my everyday shoes. I don't always wear orange, but I'm pretty good at tying things to my feet with gutted paracord. And if you look closely for the dinged spot on the ball of my foot and know that a commercial shoe did that, you can imagine why.