Shoes are an occasional topic here and I have had a few posts with shoes but this one has to be the strangest follow-up. I had Solomon X ULTRA PIONEER MID shoes and the insoles wore out fast which sucks but, as someone who doesn’t drive I expect these things. My normal go to shoes are Merrell or Salomon, Merrell are the go to war boots that survive just about everything, Solomon are the light weight shoes you do the million mile march in and they keep going.

But sometimes insoles do wear out , and they make life horrible. They are the inner base of the shoe that makes your day horrible or they make the many steps on your feet not feel like you are playing the drums with your feet. The insole was wandering around the shoe making pain in my feet. I deal with a lot of pain in my feet on the day to day as i am prone to muscle spasms .

Salomon – with their lightweight shoes, they somehow do cut the divide of weight and utility perfectly. They do not fall apart , they last for years. After buying these in early winter I wore these day to day as the traveling shoe. they manage to stay warm in winter and do not leak .. But I did notice the insole starting to shed its lining. A week ago went on a quest to replace the insole with preferably the insole that belongs with the shoes. Merrell does it I figured a higher end Mid would do the same.. No. I looked for an hour and kept falling back to the Carhartt Insite Technology Footbed CMI9000 Shoe Accessory. After Two days they shipped in and I was initially worried they would not fit.

They fit well into the shoe, they had a raised arch to comfort the arch, i put them on and thought this might cause pain and instead i decided to press on and see how it went. After a day the arch relaxed into the Mid , The insole more or less perfectly formed into place. while it adds a bit of weight the comfort level definitely went up.

Mentally… when you do something like this, it feels like using a Toyota part on a ford, Which to the average person would seem like a mortal sin. But the secret here is what the industry tries to make you not pay attention to, That parts can be used on other manufacturer parts within reason.

So when you do the math, I am taking an insole meant for people who do construction all day where weights and tolerances need to be at the top, than place it into a shoe that balances high impact and survivability . Conventionally i just took the best of both worlds where repeated day to day use has a base that is form fitting and comfortable to the point of repeated usage plays out to a higher degree.

While this only a week into this, One could hope this is a force multiplier and a message to a both companies. Carhartt makes boots to survive the Armageddon Salomon makes shoes to climb the armageddon, there is a convergence that both companies are missing here….

So my not so closing thought here is, Sometimes instinct of doing something may not be enough but sometimes taking the gut feeling leap of “this might work” sometimes pays off in kind. So if you need extra miles and extra comfort this frankenshoe experiment shall continue…