Shyheels

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!

Yes boot cut jeans would be a better idea with hiking boots, but with knee boots and certainly with OTK boots I much prefer skinny jeans. Trying to finagle jeans over the shafts of OTK boots doesn’t appeal. Too much hassle,

But we all wear something on our feet. Hosiery is an option but footwear is not. Boots, shoes, sandals, whatever, we all wear ‘em. Heels are a design element in that. One of those elements that fashions alter regularly. The buying public gets tired or bored, or designers decide they need to fire the market with something new, and there are changes. And so it goes. Heels will be back

I don’t think it will. Fashion has always been cyclical and I can’t see that changing. Heels, like skirt lengths, go up and down. The whole business model of fashion is one of near constant change although that change is more typically evolutionary rather than fast and sweeping. At the moment heels are in a lull, but the market and the people who move it will eventually become restless and start shaking things up.