Shoes for flat feet

Having Flat feet (pes planus or fallen arches), shoes are always a problem for me. On a trip to Greece my shoes fell apart and I ended up with a pair of Scholl Professionals from the local apothecary (chemist). These are black leather walking shoes have worked very well.

Recently my feet were hurting and the doctor prescribed a bottle of champagne: not to drink, but to fill with cold water and roll my foot around on. This sounded a bit complicated so I dropped into The Athletes Foot at Belconnen. For years I had been going past and seeing a display of shoes for people with foot problems. They measured my foot on the usual mechanical device and then used a computerised pressure sensor (which looked like a gimmick to me).

What I was after was a black leather shoe and they had three styles to choose from. The one I ended up with was the Ascent "Geelong Urban" (the same store also sells Scholl Orthahell). This appears to be an adult size of the running style school shoes they make for children. There is a hard plastic reinforcement in the sole under the arch of the foot. Apart from that, these shoes don't look anything special, but so far seem to work well, removing foot pain.

There is also an Ascent Delta Boot which looks interesting, this is a safety shoe, but in place of the usual steel cap it uses fibreglass, to make it lighter and so it will go through airport metal detectors. It looks like an ordinary shoe on top, has the same arch support and a more rugged sole.

Unfortunately both The Athletes Foot and Ascent have very poor web sites, making it difficult to find about their products.