I walked into a specialty running store recently with a plan. Not a vague “I’ll browse and see what looks cool” kind of plan. A real one — because I’d been dealing with some nagging post-workout pain for a while, and I was done pretending it was going to work itself out.
Nothing was catastrophic. No dramatic limp, no urgent care visit. Just that low-grade, persistent discomfort after treadmill sessions that sits right at the intersection of this is probably fine and this is probably not fine. For about a year, I’d been logging consistent miles — partly for fitness, partly for sanity, partly because I work in a field where you can spend an embarrassing amount of your day in chairs and conference rooms if you’re not intentional about it. I’ve got a standing desk. I walk the hospital floors. I pace during phone calls like a man who has somewhere very important to be. But still. The aches were stacking up, and “just stretch more” wasn’t cutting it anymore.
So I did something I probably should have done years ago: I went and got my feet actually looked at.
What I Thought Was Aging Might Have Been My Shoes
Before I made the appointment, I did what most people do — I read. Articles on misalignment, gait mechanics, how the wrong footwear doesn’t just hurt your feet but quietly affects your knees, hips, and lower back over time. The through-line in everything I found was the same: if the foundation is off, everything above it compensates. And compensation, done long enough, starts to hurt.
That clicked for me. It also made me a little uneasy, because when an explanation makes perfect sense, it usually means the problem has been sitting right in front of you for longer than you’d like to admit.
So rather than keep “pushing through it” — which, let’s be honest, is just a more respectable way of saying I’m too stubborn to ask for help — I made an appointment and walked through the door ready to hear something I might not love.
What a Real Shoe Fitting Actually Looks Like
If you’ve never been properly fitted at a specialty running store, it’s worth knowing upfront that it’s nothing like walking into a department store and pointing at a wall of shoes. This is closer to a clinical evaluation — except the person running it looks like they’ve never experienced physical discomfort in their life and would probably describe a marathon as “a nice way to spend a morning.”
They measured both feet. Examined pressure distribution. Looked at my arches. Watched how I walked. Then they put me on a treadmill with a completely different shoe on each foot so they could watch how each side moved independently, swapping models and insoles as they went. I jogged back and forth, mismatched, while they observed and adjusted and took notes. It felt equal parts thorough and absurd. At some point I realized I was essentially functioning as an N of 1 study on footwear, which I found genuinely entertaining.
The whole thing took about 45 minutes. And then came the part I wasn’t expecting.
Thirty Years of the Wrong Size
For as long as I can remember — since high school, maybe early college — I have been a size 8½, regular width. That number was handed to me once by someone with a Brannock device, and I filed it away permanently, right next to my blood type and my strong opinions about Pepsi versus Coke that I haven’t revisited since the ’90s. It wasn’t something I questioned. It was just a fact about me.
Turns out, it wasn’t.
I’m a size 8. Wide. For roughly thirty years, I had been buying shoes that were a half size too long and not nearly wide enough, and then wondering why things felt off after a run. My arches weren’t being supported correctly. My alignment was compensating in ways I couldn’t feel until the miles added up. And those aches I’d been writing off as the natural consequence of getting older? Gone after one workout in properly fitted shoes.
I want to be clear: I’m not saying I’ve been in agony for three decades. I’m saying I’ve been tolerating a quiet, low-grade mismatch for three decades — and the more I ran, the louder it got.
Where Else Am I Getting This Wrong?
Here’s where it stopped being a shoe story for me.
In the weeks after the fitting, I kept coming back to one question: when did I last actually check? Not assume. Not go off what I thought I remembered. Check. Because my shoe size didn’t update itself. I had to walk in, admit something seemed off, and ask someone to take a real look. And the answer I got was completely different from the one I’d been operating on for most of my adult life.
So the obvious follow-up: where else am I doing this?
It’s a genuinely uncomfortable question if you sit with it. Most of us have beliefs about ourselves — about what we’re good at, how we lead, what we’re capable of — that were formed early and haven’t been seriously examined since. The self-assessment you built in your first management role, still running in the background years later even though the team is different and you’re different. The story you wrote about your own limitations based on one or two data points, now treated like settled science. The car seat position you set in 2003 because it was fine, and you’ve never touched it since.
We run on defaults. That’s not a flaw — defaults are how we function without burning through mental energy on things that don’t need constant attention. But defaults stop serving us when we forget they exist. When a conscious choice quietly becomes an unexamined assumption. When we stop asking whether something still fits and just trust that it must, because it always has.
That’s usually when the aches show up. Quiet at first. Easy to attribute to something else.
Effort Won’t Fix a Fit Problem
What I keep coming back to is this: the pain I was feeling wasn’t weakness. It wasn’t a sign I needed to be tougher or push harder or just commit to a better stretching routine. It was information. My body flagging, consistently and without drama, that something was off.
We get the same kind of signals in our work and our leadership all the time — fatigue that doesn’t match the actual workload, a persistent low-grade friction in roles we’re supposed to be built for, dread that shows up reliably before certain kinds of work. The instinct, especially for people wired toward achievement, is to respond to that friction by increasing effort. More discipline. More pushing through.
But effort doesn’t fix a fit problem. It just makes the fit problem easier to ignore for a little longer. And sometimes the most useful thing you can do isn’t dig deeper — it’s stop and ask whether you’re working with the right setup in the first place.
When’s the Last Time You Got Re-Measured?
The people at the running store didn’t make me feel foolish for walking in with thirty years of incorrect assumptions about my own feet. They just measured where I actually was, not where I’d been, and helped me move forward. No judgment. No drama. Just an honest look at current reality.
That’s really all I’m suggesting here. Not a life audit. Not some sweeping reassessment of everything you’ve ever believed about yourself. Just an occasional, honest question: does this still fit?
Your routines. Your assumptions. The mental frameworks you’ve been running on since your twenties. Maybe they still hold up perfectly — and if so, great, you’ve confirmed something worth keeping. But if something has been quietly aching and you’ve been chalking it up to circumstance or age or just the way things are, it might be worth getting re-measured.
I’m running better now. My feet are happy. My knees have officially withdrawn their formal complaints. And somewhere in my closet there’s a pile of size 8½ regular shoes that are, at this point, basically just metaphors with laces.