Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.

Last time I went Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow., it was from inline skating.

This time, it was from wearing shoes at a wedding.

In this case, I had the shoes on for about 5 hours, before I finally decided I’d had enough and took them off around 11:00pm.

The interesting thing (“interesting” as in, “what the heck was I thinking?”) happened the next morning. As I got out of bed, I felt a sharp pain along the arch of my left foot.

Egads—plantar fasciitis, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. My foot was complaining about whatever the heck it is that the shoes had done to it: maybe preventing the arch from working properly.

There was another effect: I have some shattered cartilage in my right knee that I usually don’t have too much trouble with. Well, my knee ached the entire morning, finally easing off in the afternoon.

My guess is that, in shoes, you really only have a rather limited set of ways that you can put down your foot. The shoe tends to dictate what your foot, and thereby the entire rest of your leg musculature, can so. And that meant that I was walking using that knee in a different, less accommodating fashion. And that meant it was putting stresses on my knee that it really didn’t like.

This is just another example of what shoe-wearing can do to our bodies, and why the outside world really ought to be more understanding of going barefooted.

[Yes, I know that I wore shoes at a wedding just last summer and didn’t have later foot or leg pain. I have no idea what the difference was. I just know that this time it really seemed to matter.]