By Lottey Matthews, Podiatrist.
Theres a certain misconception that goes both ways: should ski boots be comfortable? Well, it depends on who you ask and it depends who is asking!
For your everyday skier who wants to go to their ski lesson for the morning and break when the bars open, then yes! This also includes a certain breed of skiers whose idea of white soft pillows are found somewhere in the head of a freshly poured beer, for these people the invention of hybrid boots (with a walk mode… yes you heard me), combines comfort with ski-ability.
However, if you are someone who wishes to ski 50 days plus, drop cliffs and charge hard then comfort is more of a relative term, for these people (myself included although I am happier filming the cliff jumps than dropping them), then a season will require a sacrifice, that price being at LEAST one toenail. Don’t worry though, it will grow back, just in time to be given up again for the next winter. Sadly this process takes time and often throughout the summer the market for prosthetic toenails – such as wilde-pedique, see Dulwich podiatry for pricing wink – increases, you don’t want to be the focus of a July wedding to be how many toenails are you missing!
The regrowth of toenails is a beautiful thing (just me? Ok), after the initial OUCH MY TOE HURTS, this is usually followed by a painless but impressively bruised nail, all the while your body is cooking up something amazing. A replacement toenail. Which will be slowly and inorexibly growing beneath the old one until the new one is ready to take the brunt on its own. In some more traumatic cases the nail will be removed in one fell swoop by the initial trauma, in this case a visit to the podiatrist for some padding, cleaning and reassurance from the pros may be in order.
In skiing a good boot fitter will scope you out and suggest appropriate sizing in length and width and also how you tolerate the fit, bear in mind that a boot will only ever get more roomy and a boot that fits like a slipper on day one will ski like a slipper in one week! Making more room in a ski boot is easy, taking it out, not so much, but also a boot that is just too small exists too (hence the need for a god boot fitter to find your Cinderella boot) because enough room for blood to flow to your feet is good too you know? Most toenails are lost from a boot being too big rather than being to small, go figure*.
So yes, ski boots can be comfortable, but how comfortable do you really want them
to be?
*the process of repeatedly coming off the pressure of the end of the boot only to slam into it again and again as in a big boot is much more likely to evict a nail rather than nice snug consistent pressure to the end of your boot. Bear in mind to trim your toenails pre ski hols, and as I explained to a client renting boots; a long beautiful acrylic toenail is probably more suited to a sunshine beach trip than snowsports the mountains.
