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.
Labels: flat feet, shoes
In "A perfect fit, except for the boots" (Jewel Topsfield, The Age, 10 April 2010) cabinetmaker Jayme-Lee Cooney complains about finding well fitting work boots. Yesterday I tried on the Ascent Alpha. This is very comfortable and relatively light despite having a standards compliant safety toe cap. This has simialr technology to the Ascent Geelong I am wearing and have found very comfortable. I actually went into the store to try the Ascent Delta Safety Shoe. The store had no stock of the shoes in my size so I tried the boot, which is like the same sole and toe cap as the shoe. One appealing feature is that fibreglass is sued for the toecap and plastic for the reinforcing and other parts which are normally steel. Apart from being lighter this means the footwear does not set off airport metal detectors.