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Pilgrim Topics Related to all Routes
🥾 Equipment and Clothes
Hiking Shoes, or Hiking Boots?
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[QUOTE="Green Tortuga, post: 123289, member: 23617"] That can happen with any kind of footwear, so I don't think it's really fair to pick on running shoes. I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in running shoes. I've done the Camino and let me tell you, it's a walk in the park by comparison. =) Now, I will say that it's important to have shoes that fit well and are comfortable. Lightweight is also good--tying lead weights to your feet isn't going to help you finish the trail, and neither will heavy boots. But I'll also say one of the main causes of sprained ankles and blisters--poorly conditioned feet. I saw this most when I hiked the Appalachian Trail. I was a relative flat foot. Never really backpacked before, never walked long distances. Rarely walked more than a few miles at a time. That first week on the Appalachian Trail darned near crippled me. The blisters were everywhere and I was spraining my ankles on a daily basis. My ankles looked like they had golf balls tucked under the skin they had swollen so much and putting on or taking off my shoes was extremely painful. Fast forward a month, though, and the blisters went away, the swelling went down, and--well, my feet were always sore to some degree, but they didn't HURT anymore. What did I change? Absolutely nothing. My feet just got stronger. The skin on my foot grew thick and stopped blistering. My ankles grew strong and I'd still have bad a bad foot falls that would twist my ankle just like before--but it didn't sprain anymore. There was one moment, about a thousand miles into my hike, when I really twisted my foot badly on a rock, so badly that the ground seemed to cover the side of my foot more than it did the bottom of my foot. I managed to catch myself with my trekking pole before I fell to the ground and got my feet back under me, but I felt like Superman. My ankle didn't hurt AT ALL after the experience. If I had done that my first day on the trail, I could have totally believed it would have taken me off the trail for a week if I were lucky. And now my ankle just springed back into place like nothing had happened. So I'm absolutely convinced that a lot of the foot and ankle problems have--it's not because of shoes or lack of "support" (ankle, arch, or otherwise)--it's because we're out of shape from sitting around the couch and office all day. What you don't use wastes away, and the initial foot problems aren't a sign of bad shoes but rather of bad feet. Perhaps wearing "shoes with training wheels" might help at first while you're breaking in your feet, but eventually, if you walk long enough and hard enough, you'll find that they really aren't necessary. A cheap pair of walking shoes can easily carry you 500 to 700 miles without any trouble at all over terrain that's far more challenging than the Camino will throw at you. Another observation I learned from my time on the Appalachian Trail--I met a lot of hikers who "downgraded" to walking shoes, but I never met anyone who "upgraded" to hiking boots. Something to think about. =) And finally, there's a book called [URL="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0070444587/?tag=casaivar02-20"]Long-Distance Hiking: Lessons from the Appalachian Trail[/url], where the author surveyed hundreds of people who hiked the AT about all sorts of information including the footwear they used, and he found no correlation between the type of shoes someone wore and the number of sprains reported. Those high-top shoes didn't seem to cause any reduction of sprains--they just made people's feet heavier. -- Ryan [/QUOTE]
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