I left my house and immediately noticed my feet felt weird.
The day before, I had cleared out a cupboard and found a pair of trainers I bought 5 years ago. I had stopped wearing them as they were a little bit worn out. Not bad enough to throw into the bin but apparently just good enough to be stored cupboard indefinitely.
So I decided I’d wear them 10-20 more times by which point they would be worn out and bad enough to bin without guilt.
As I walked out of my house with the old pair on, something didn’t feel right.
Whenever I return from holiday and lie in my own bed, as soon as my head hits the pillow, it just feels right. Well, these shoes had the exact opposite feeling.
All of my toes were slightly curled in but worse, my 5th toe and the metatarsal were being squished into my fourth. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought I was wearing someone else’s shoes. Which was strange because these trainers were really comfortable when I used to wear them.
I’m in my 30s so the bones obviously haven’t changed. The change has come from the soft tissue. Over the last 10 years, I’ve spent a lot of time training my feet and getting my feet to move better. As they move better, the soft tissue has changed resulting in my feet getting longer but much wider.
In 10 years, they have “grown” 3 shoe sizes.
But these shoes were less than 5 years old and most of the noticeable changes in my feet happened in the first 2 years of training them. How could they be so cramped?
So I searched my Amazon orders to find out when I bought these trainers. Maybe I bought them more than 5 years ago but just forgot. But I was right, I did buy them 5 years ago. What I missed was that my trainers were 2 sizes smaller than compared to what I wear today.
We often have big changes that have been made by small continuous changes.
We only experience the tiny day-to-day changes so it’s easy to miss the big accumulated change.
Having these shoes was a nice yet uncomfortable reminder of all the progress I’ve made.
This short story was first published in my newsletter, Thinking Loudly. If you enjoyed this story and would like to get a weekly short story from me, please sign up for my newsletter.