Da Agony of Da Feet . . . okay, i'm sorry for that

My feet have been hurting for the past few months. I go to the health club about five days a week, and I walk 4.5 miles each time on the treadmill, plus I spend some time on the elliptical trainer and I do some arm exercises with free weights. Anyway, one day as I was massaging my aching feet after I got home from working out, I suddenly remembered the sales guy who sold me my walking shoes telling me that I should replace them every 300 miles or so. Hmm, I've had these shoes for 13 or 14 months, which means they have about 1,200 miles on them. I smacked myself on the forehead and said, "Duh! No wonder my feet hurt!" Of course, ever since I realized that, my feet REALLY hurt!

I've been kind of looking at new shoes the past week or so, whenever I've been out and had a few minutes. But you really need to spend more than a stolen moment or two to try on walking shoes. So today I decided to spend the whole day looking for new shoes.

We have a dinky little mall in our small town, but it has three shoe stores, plus shoe departments in three department stores. We also have an outlet mall, and it has six or seven shoe stores. I also need a new pair of dress shoes, so I thought I'd shop for both, seeing as how I was going to be at all those shoe stores. So I had quite a job ahead of me.

Well, it seemed like a good idea this morning.

Shopping for dress shoes and athletic shoes at the same time is just a really bad idea. No matter how comfortable a particular pair of dress shoes might be, they just aren't going to be as comfortable as tennis shoes, and so all those dress shoes that looked so cute on display got rejected because they failed the comparison test with the tennis shoes.

I did ultimately have good luck. I found two pairs of walking shoes on clearance in my size, and once I bought them, I was able to focus on dress shoes and found a pair that'll do for now, also on clearance.

I am now looking forward to my workout tomorrow, with not-aching feet for a change!