I received a much-needed day off from work today, so I decided to go skiing at Snowbird. The skiing was OK. It wasn’t as good as I had hoped after 16 inches of fresh snow had fallen on Monday night/Tuesday morning. (I should’ve gone to Alta, which opened Devil’s Castle for the first time after the storm on this day.)
Worse, however, was the fact that my ski boots were causing me excruciating pain today. I can’t accurately predict how, when, or why this debilitating level of pain will occur, but it often happens at the worst times for whatever reason (such as a mid-week ski day at Snowbird shortly after 16 inches of fresh powder had fallen). Since new ski boots were in my near future, I decided that I couldn’t stand the pain anymore, so I headed to my chosen local unnamed custom ski boot shop for a fitting.
I had done some research into my custom ski boot fitting options intermittently over the past five years. I was sure that I didn’t want to go back to the same shop I had gone to in January 2006 because I was less than thrilled with the results. My research suggested that I had two other legitimate options. I chose the one I chose because I had seen many others wearing their product (many more than their competitor), and because they actually responded to an inquisitory e-mail I had sent a week or two earlier.
After an hour or so of fitting, I walked out of the store with a much lighter wallet, a new pair of boots slung over my shoulder, and a sick spot in my stomach because I knew from experience that much additional work would be needed to make these boots work for me and my ridiculous feet. The saddest part about this process is that I know exactly what needs to be done, but when I go back to that boot shop, they will not just do it, they will not believe that I have the problems I have, they will introduce doubt into my own convictions about the problem, and I will spend countless hours wasting my time playing their games and worrying whether or not the problems will ever (after 5+ years now) get fixed.
Ski Boot Fitting Minutiae 