Shyheels

Wood is an excellent shock absorber. It’s why surveyors usually have wooden tripods for their laser surveying gear - it’s not that they can’t or won’t afford carbon fibre but because wood simply dampens vibrations that much better. Photographers, for whom weight is often an issue, waver between carbon fibre and aluminium - wanting the stabilising weight of aluminium, and the easier portability of carbon fibre. But for vibration reduction and stability, neither holds a candle to wood

Yes, go to Rome or any Italian city and you’ll see plenty of elegant high-heeled women zipping about in Vespas

I can tell you absolutely that you don't want to pilot a narrowboat in heels! Certainly not stilettos! You could probably get away with it in chunky heeled boots with 7 to 8 cm heels, but I wouldn't fancy it - not as a single-hander, unless you had someone to work the locks.

I’ve never tried driving in heels although I don’t think I’d find it a problem, except perhaps for worrying about damaging the heels. I can drive a manual easily - I learned in them, drive them all my life and indeed most of the cars here are manual. I can also drive a left or right hand drive vehicle, changing back and forth readily as I used to have to do on a regular basis when I travelled a lot

It’s always best to write what you know

No, the cramping i experienced in my calves is/was directly and unambiguously associated with my not being used to walking in 12cm stilettos. With practice the cramping went away, and pretty quickly.

Me too!

That’s horrific. You mother should have gone to prison. I can’t imagine being so twisted

Buying sneakers is a real rarity for me. I have nearly always worn boots of some sort, except for cycling or going to the gym. Or many years ago when I used to run marathons. I bought the Converse because I liked the pastel colours and so ironically they’ve ended up being like @higherheels Hot Chicks - purchased because they looked fun and ended up being left in the closet because they’re hard to wear!

@mlroseplant and @higherheels - Thank you for your presence and encouragement! I’m really quite chuffed. I really feel quite at ease. To be sure I’m not out striding a high street, on roughened sidewalks, taking curbs and hustling to cross that the lights, but as I walk confidently around indoors I can certainly now imagine doing such a thing and doing it with reasonable grace. i too find this who catwalk routine ridiculous. It looks exaggerated and absurd on the catwalk. In real life it would be comical.

Yes, Keds, like Converse, are flat, offer no support and in my case the thinness of the soles gives no cushioning to the nerves in the balls of my feet. They are much more painful than my leather soled stilettos

I think maybe I'm starting to get somewhere with my practicing, even if it is just indoors. I put on my heels this morning and felt really quite grounded, on solid footing. Its really nice!

I totally agree. Discomfort is one thing, actual pain is something else and is never something to put up with. Stop, recuperate, find out what caused the issue then fix it or modify whatever you need to prevent it from happening again. I have never done anything silly with heels, but I’ve ignored pain while training for distance running many years ago and learned to regret it. curiously enough the footware that seems to be most likely to give me problems are Converse trainers (sneakers) I bought a couple pair because I liked the pastel colours and then discovered that the thin rubber soles led to some serious pain in the nerves in the ball of my right foot. I stopped wearing them except on days when I know I won’t have to walk far - ironically not unlike I do with my 12cm stilettos!

Yes I guess that is very much a First World problem - the potential troubles with driving in towering Louboutin stilettos! Not a problem shared by much of the world. I can see too where the 13cm heels on Hot Chicks might not be suitable for a lot of situations. And a bit of overkill for grocery shopping! In a way our challenges are quite similar. There is nowhere within easy walking distance for me to wear my 12cm heels or indeed any stilettos. Simply getting off the boat in them would be impossible. I’m moored along a little jetty which is essentially a long fibreglass grate. A stiletto heel would simply go through one of the holes before you took a single step. And then there is the muddy chalky towpath for a kilometre before a very steep farm road up into town. So I have to put my stilettos in a backpack and change into them. I can do that in the park and practice there, but wearing 12cm stilettos in a small farm town grocery store seems overkill, Otherwise it’s a matter of catching a bus to a bigger town. And so the obstacles to real world practice start to build up.

Yes, Hot Chicks are a pretty serious challenge. I had thought my indoor practice in my heels would have meant more than it did. Real world walking is so much different. I kind of like the challenge though. I’m looking forward to another try at the park

@higherheels Thank you so much! This high heels challenge has been such a help and such fun too. I’ve bought myself a new pair of jeans to wear with my 12cm boots as a reward for my hard work - and hopefully will get to wear them soon to a cafe for cake and coffee. Just need to get in a bit more real world practice. I have to be certain I can ace this! How are things going with the Hot Chicks? Did you ever reward yourself with the night out you mentioned after your successful outing a few weeks ago?

I’ve seen the videos, read the articles and had advice from female friends who are extremely skilled in walking in heels and all of this is great, in the abstract, but nothing replaces the actual doing - practice, practice and practice.

So true. I have made the effort recently to go to the park and practice on a paved and gently undulating footpath and straightaway noticed the difference! As you say 100 metres might as well be 1000. I did a couple hundred metres, I would guess, and very much needed a break. It was fun though. I need to go back.

Yes. That’s what concerns me as I practice indoors with my 12cm boots. I love the idea of wearing them out to a cafe for coffee but have to find a way to get real world walking in before I even think about that. On the bright side, I continue to improve. I especially love cooking in heels.

Same with football with these vicious crunching tackles. I remember a particularly egregious one in an Australian Rules match once and the announcer saying, as they replayed it in loving slow motion at least a dozen times, “Boy, that’s something you never like to see …”

Funnily enough only yesterday I bought a pair of boot cut jeans - to wear with my ankle boots with 8cm chunky heels, and because they also look better with hiking boots. Yes, the boot cut partially obscures the heels on my ankle boots, but then I don’t wear them to show off or make a point, and actually the boots looks really good with these jeans.

Very impressive! Long, long ago when I was running marathons - way back when Pheidippides was still running for the Athens Under-9s Track Club - I used to keep track of the mileage on my running shoes. I was running between 70 and 100 miles a week so it was a matter of interest to me to know how long they’d last. Clocking over 100 miles in a pair of mules seems like pretty decent mileage. Happily with boots i don’t need to worry about the flapping sound, or at least not usually. Last year the front part of the Vibram soles on my old mountaineering boots came loose and I had to listen to the flip flop sound all the way back to my boat. Fortunately some epoxy glue sorted out the issue

Oh dear, that doesn’t sound good! I’ve been some good indoors practice this week. On the subject of height in heels, I fielded a funny question this week from a passer-by (those of us who live in narrowboats are objects of great curiosity to non-canal folk) who wanted to know if it wasn’t rather tiresome having to crawl around inside all the time! He thought that the height of the cabin was what he could see above the gunwales and that living aboard was like living in a tent. I explained that the ceilings were quite high and that even a six-footer such as I could stand upright in high heels. He believed me about the ceiling height, but assumed I was kidding about the heels.

On the flip side of this, when I first tried on heels I thoughtlessly bent over to pick up a piece of paper that had slipped to the floor, forgetting momentarily that I was in 10cm heels! I nearly face-planted on the floor - an early lesson that the world is a different place in heels and you need to do things a bit differently when you’re wearing them!

That is indeed a good idea! I do a lot of my practicing in my 12cm heels while cooking in my galley. I’d not considered the other advantages! Thanks!