The Great Shoe Shortage

I regret to report there is a shoe shortage, but only for the pointy, stabby kind. If you don’t need footwear that can do violence, you might be okay. Slow and steady wins the race, mainly because their faster opponents won’t have any footwear. I haven’t watched the news in a while, but I assume this is the greatest crisis currently facing the nation, if not the world. The great malaise of a lack of clawed running gear is upon us. If the shortage hasn’t hit your area yet, hoard those spikes while you still can.

I’m not anyone’s first choice as a shopping partner. It’s a TV trope that uninvolved dads don’t know their kids’ shoe and clothing sizes. In my case, it’s true, but my ignorance is justified. I have girls. Their clothing sizes are broken into overlapping, incomprehensible tiers, and my kids are on the bubble for all of them. Depending on the brand, any size from youth to adult might be right. They get that from Lola, who is just as hard to dress. She wears youth larges or adult extra smalls. Which one of those is bigger? There’s literally no way to know. The sizing chart for women on most clothing websites is a shrug emoji. I know that Lucy and Lola both wear size seven shoes, but Lucy’s are a youth seven and Lola’s is a women’s seven, which is a men’s five. Why aren’t men’s, women’s, and children’s shoes measured on the same scale to show you the actual size of the thing? Because the first rule of sales is to never, ever let you know what you’re buying. I’ve never been a numbers person, and I also have absolutely no fashion sense. When it came to dividing family duties, Lola took over dressing everyone and I took over staying out of the way of all clothing decisions. I mostly handle things that no one else will see. If it will ever travel outside the house where it could bring shame upon our family, it will forever be Lola’s jurisdiction. The only reason we haven’t been shunned by the rest of society is because of her.

The one exception is sports apparel. I handle most required purchases for team gear. I can deal with those because they’re usually just a link the coach sends out. All I have to do is ask the kids which version of the hoodie or jersey they want and what size they are that day of the week. I also order other sports stuff because I did sports. It’s an ongoing punishment for prior bad decisions. Running shoes fall squarely in my lane. I’m the one who ruined Betsy’s life by getting her into cross country and track. Without my nefarious influence, she might have grown up to be a productive member of society who didn’t have constant shin splints. She has special insoles and shoes with extra padding. It doesn’t seem like it, but running is actually a high impact sport. Unlike with football, the only person you hurt is yourself. I also bought Betsy a nice smart watch that tracks her speed and route. It was my act of contrition for steering her toward the beloved pastime that destroyed my knees. It’s not a generational trauma unless you pass it down.

This week, Betsy told me that she needed new racing spikes. She had been using her current ones for two cross country seasons and two track seasons. I don’t know if there’s a point where they really go bad. There’s not much to them. They’ve got canvas on top and knives on the bottom with a thin layer of plastic in between. If the shoes don’t have holes in them, they’re good to go as far as I’m concerned. The problem was that I wasn’t the one concerned. These were Betsy’s shoes for Betsy’s races. I didn’t need her first thought during every race to be that she was at a disadvantage because her dad is cheap. Shoes are like tires and erasers. If you use them, they wear out. My buddy who does triathlons goes through a pair of shoes every three months. I don’t run at all any more and my shoes last for years. It seems like I made better decisions than him until you realize that I have four kids and he has none. I’ll be buying more shoes than him for many, many years to come.

I keep referring to Betsy’s racing shoes as spikes, which might be confusing to readers who never made the mistake of running competitively. Spikes are the name of the entire pair of shoes and also of the metal pyramids on the bottom. Coming up with two different words was too much work. There were layoffs that week at the dictionary factory. The metal spikes on the bottom wear out faster than the shoes themselves, especially since they are only an advantage for stabbable terrain. As you might have guessed, cross country crosses all sorts of country. That includes pavement. On hard surfaces, the spikes provide negative grip, although they do sometimes cause cool sparks. They’re like those light up shoes, but with a risk of causing a forest fire.

By the middle of last track season, Betsy’s spikes were so ground down that they were little more than gentle nubs. You could have poked yourself in the eye with one and not been hurt. She wanted to replace them but couldn’t get them out with the flimsy spike removal tool that came with the shoes. She handed them to me at 10:30 p.m. the night before a big meet. Instead of going to bed, I went through my tool bench, using every pair of pliers and clamps I own. Finally, through much force and even more swearing, I removed all of the spikes. It might have been the manliest thing I’ve ever done. Then again, if Lola had been awake, she would have found a way to gently remove the spikes with science rather than squeezing a pair of handles so hard that she damaged the ligaments in her hand. We’ll never know because she slept through a perfect opportunity to be a hero. As is so often the case, the glory went to the person with the later bed time. If the spikes were that hard to remove, the holes they were in were likely damaged as well. Getting a new pair would make everyone’s lives easier, even if it diminished my opportunities to save the day. I agreed to take Betsy shoe shopping Saturday. Most of the time, the most heroic thing I can do is pull out my credit card.

Our trip had to be Saturday because that’s when the specialty running shoe store was having a sale for our school. After being there a few times, I’m convinced that all such deals are a scam. There’s always a sale of some kind for the same amount, whether it’s for athletes at our school or student athletes in general or just for having feet and breathing air. Regardless, it gave us a deadline to act rather than letting me put this off until the night before the first race. We weren’t alone for the trip. Betsy asked me if we could take a teammate, Gill, who lives a few blocks away. He doesn’t have a car or a phone, and his parents were out of state. If he wanted to call them, he had to use his smart doorbell, which let his parents talk to him but didn’t let him talk back. With some kids, that might be ideal, but it wasn’t with him. If he wanted to ask a question, he had to write it down on a piece of paper and hold it up to the camera. There was a lot to unpack in that situation. I couldn’t solve complex family dynamics, but I could take him to the shoe store so he was ready for cross country season. Retail therapy and family therapy have more overlap than you’d think.

We went to an insanely busy shopping area with approximately two million other cars, yet somehow found a parking spot directly in front of the store. It was our last good luck of the day. Inside, a salesman who looked like he ran ten miles a day used a computerized system to precisely measure Betsy and Gill’s feet. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that precise. The machine said Betsy needed a women’s nine and her friend needed a men’s 7.5, which are exactly the same size. It’s possible it spits out that size for everyone. It would explain why they were sold out. The salesman went into the back for a suspiciously long time. When he emerged, he had a single pair of shoes with those dimensions. They were the only ones in the entire store. They were the pinkest pink that ever pinked. It wasn’t even a cool neon pink. It was somewhere between bubble gum and Pepto-Bismol. I asked if Gill would be okay wearing that color. He said he would—spikes are known for being crazy, bold colors, and two of his teammates wore a slightly better pink last year—but that his dad would not approve. That was an issue retail therapy was powerless to solve. Thankfully, it wasn’t the deciding factor. Betsy’s feet are wide, and his feet were narrow, yet somehow the only pair of shoes in the right size didn’t fit either of them. If they had both wanted the pair, they would have had to fight. Instead, they might both have to race barefoot.

The salesman called his company’s two other shoe stores in the city. Between them, there was only one other pair of women’s nines. I wasn’t going to drive twenty minutes to try them on when one kid (but more likely two) would leave disappointed. Apparently buying shoes for the season at the start of the season was an ignorant decision. Better parents shop for fall sports in March. I’m not sure what happens if your kids grow in between. I guess you’re supposed to stop feeding them. The shortage was all the more confusing because Betsy has the most common women’s shoe size in the country. Somehow, the major shoe brands forgot that women have feet. The salesman was very helpful and apologetic. He didn’t order the inventory or create society-wide shoe sexism. He referred us to a competitor, who was only two miles away. I apologized for not being able to buy something from him so he could get a commission for his trouble. Hopefully everyone else he saw that day had either smaller or bigger feet.

We drove to the competitor, who offered a huge upgrade by having two pairs of women’s nines/men’s 7.5s. Instead of being weirdly pink, they had a tropical color palette that I would describe as angry mango. The nine/7.5s didn’t fit either kid. The saleswoman, who was a middle school teacher during the week, went in back to see what else was available. She increased Gill’s by one size and Betsy’s by a size and a half, mainly because that was all they had as alternatives. Somehow, the differently sized shoes fit each kid perfectly, even though they supposedly had nearly identical feet. Teachers really are magic. That place also had a discount (because we were buying spikes on a Saturday in August two days before the first full moon), but not quite as much as at the first shoe store that didn’t have any shoes. It’s easy to slash the price on something you don’t carry. In hindsight, that first store might have been a money laundering front for the mob. I should have asked if they had any concrete shoes. Luckily, the second place had exactly enough shoes for two kids. If your children need spikes after that, my apologies. They’ll have to change sports. Try polo. I didn’t see anybody looking for riding boots.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James