Foot and lower leg pains

[MBlanchrd@aol.com]

Hi, Campers,

   Have you ever noticed how we will spend thousands of dollars on our
horses...saddles, shoes, trailers, vet bills, the best in hay, feed, stabling,
fencing, etc...and yet we humans walk around in running shoes with our toes
hanging out, jeans with holes in them, T-shirts that have seen better days
under a leaky engine...if the horse coughs the vet is here within minutes and
if we cough we say, "I don't have time to be sick?" 

The point being, perhaps some of (I'm sorry, I don't remember who posted about
her achy feet) of our foot and leg problems are what we're wearing for boots
and shoes. Every one buys shoes of one size, but we are just like our
horses..none of us have perfect conformation. We try to cram our feet into
certain sizes because they sorta kinda fit. You wouldn't force a horse with
size 0 feet to wear 00 shoes, would you? Why do people do that to themselves?

I speak from painful experience. Shin splints, heel spurs,  etc...why?
Because I have one foot that is significantly larger than the other.( I'm
talking a whole size larger  and two letter widths wider).
 For years I bought one pair of boots, shoes, etc, to fit the larger one,
letting my smaller one shlep around in the big shoe. It could swim in the
bigger shoe. Extra socks? pffft..then I'd have one sock slipping and sliding
around inside the other, which invariably meant blisters.

I stopped having pain in my feet and legs when I started buying TWO pairs of
boots. I can hear you all screaming now, but you'd be surprised...Red WIng
shoe stores, for instance, have a mismatched shoe program, where you buy one
pair of boots at retail price, and the other at cost.
 Yes, you end up with another pair of boots that are unusable..to YOU.
However, Red Wing will take them or YOU can donate them to Goodwill, Salvation
Army, etc. You'd be amazed at how quickly they go, one boot at a time!! PLUS
you can take it off your taxes as a donation.........
There's even a website for trading and searching for mismated shoes, though I
don't know what it's address is. (I had it bookmarked, once, before my
computer went dead one night..)

When working around horses, I've always kept two things in mind: 1. Will this
boot protect my foot should my horse step on it? and 2. how far can I walk in
these boots if I come off my horse miles from the barn? If the answer is "No"
to 1 and "not very far" to 2, you're not wearing the right boots.

Just my two cents worth..
Michelle, with two left feet, and Jordan with four.....