I Measured My Feet at 54

Here's a question worth sitting with: when did anyone last measure your feet?

For me the honest answer is never — not once as an adult. I've bought men's 11 or 11.5 for thirty-odd years on a simple test. The shoe went on. My toes weren't touching the front. That'll do.

I never thought about width at all. It didn't occur to me that width was a thing you chose.

Ten minutes with a sheet of paper told me I'd been wrong the whole time.

Feet don't stay the same

They flatten. The arch drops a little as the ligaments that hold it lose some of their spring, and a flatter foot is a longer, wider foot. The fat pad under the heel and the ball thins out. Toes drift.

None of this is a disease. It's the same category of thing as needing reading glasses — it happens to nearly everyone, on roughly the same schedule, and the only real mistake is not adjusting for it.

Most people gain half a size to a full size between thirty and sixty. Width changes more than length does.

The measurement

It takes ten minutes and you need a sheet of paper, a pencil, and a ruler.

Do it at the end of the day. Your feet are at their largest after you've been on them. Measuring in the morning gives you a number that's wrong by the time you actually need it.

1. Put the paper on a hard floor against a wall.
2. Stand on it with your heel touching the wall. Stand — don't sit. Weight through the foot changes the shape.
3. Have someone trace around your foot holding the pencil vertical, or trace it yourself as best you can.
4. Do the other foot on a separate sheet.
5. Measure length heel to longest toe, and width at the widest point across the ball.

Then compare both feet. They will not match, and the difference matters.

What I found

• Left foot: 11.34 inches long, 4.45 inches wide
• Right foot: 11.46 inches long, 4.57 inches wide

I'd have told you beforehand that my feet were near enough identical. I'd have guessed around 11.3 or 11.4 inches long, and I'd have been about right on that.

I was not expecting my right foot to be measurably wider than my left.

Run those numbers through a sizing conversion and it comes out at a US 12 on the left and a 12.5 on the right, with a width somewhere between 2E and 3E.

I'd been buying 11.5 in a standard width. A full size short. Two or three width grades too narrow.

The width was the part that stopped me. Length I'd have caught eventually — a shoe that's too short announces itself, usually through your toenails. Width just quietly hurts, in a way that's easy to put down to the day you've had.

And it explained the one thing I'd never been able to account for: why it's always the right foot. It's bigger in both directions. Same shoe, and one foot is being squeezed in two dimensions while the other is only squeezed in one.

The bit that made me angry

Here's what I hadn't understood: shoe width is not a small adjustment on the same shoe. It's a different last — the form the shoe is built around. A "wide" version of a shoe isn't the standard one stretched. It's a different shape entirely, or it should be.

Which means that if you're a wide foot buying standard shoes, no amount of breaking in, lacing, or better socks is going to get you there. You are asking a shape to become a different shape. It won't.

I spent about twenty years doing that.

Three things worth knowing before you go shopping

Your two feet are different, and you buy for the bigger one. Roughly everyone has a mismatch. The smaller foot can be managed with lacing or a thicker sock. The bigger one can't be managed at all.

Sizes are not standard between brands. Or even between models within a brand. Your measurement is the fixed thing — the number on the box is an opinion.

Look at the shoe from above. This tells you more than the label. If the front tapers to a point, your toes will be compressed no matter what width is printed on it. You want a front that stays broad — closer to the actual shape of a foot.

What I do now

Four months in a wider fit with a genuinely roomy toe box. The first thing I noticed was that my forefoot wasn't squeezed after an hour or two of walking. Then that I could go noticeably further before the burning turned up at all.

I'll say the honest version: it didn't fix everything. Seven or eight miles on hard ground and I'll still feel it in the ball of my right foot by the end of the day. It arrives much later and it's milder, but it arrives. What got fixed was the part that was purely a fit problem — which turned out to be most of it, but not all of it.

We build our orthopedic boots on a wide last with a genuinely broad toe box and an orthopedic footbed. But I'd rather you measured your feet and bought the right thing from anyone than bought the wrong thing from us.

Go trace your feet tonight. It's ten minutes and a sheet of paper, and it may explain something you've been putting up with for a decade.

Orthopedic Hiking Boots · $89.95

General information, not medical advice.

Eric is 54 and is a contributor to the Northman's Outdoor blog.