I did my best to do some skiing today. As you can see from the picture, there’s not so much snow in the forest so it was with the smallest of margins I could ski on the trail without having the skis come in contact with the ground under the snow.

At first it felt great to be on the skis again, but after a few km I felt that old familiar sting in my feet, telling me that these ski boots which were supposed to fix my ski boot problem were in fact not the solution. After a few more km the dull pain became a sharp stab at every step, and I knew that the skin was broken. But I still had a few km back home so all that remained was to fight against the pain and put one foot in front of the other, trying to keep a steady pace because every deviation to a steady pattern makes it hurt more. When I finally got home and took of the boots, I saw that the blisters didn’t look very bad. In fact, they look decidedly harmless. However, those small blisters have the power to completely ruin a trip because the pain is so overwhelming that you can’t think of anything else. You just want to take off the damn boots, in fact I actually considered walking home in my socks.

I inspected the boots and found that there is a part of the padding that protrudes and this is what caused the chafing in the same spot on both of my feet. This is not the same problem as I had with my two previous pairs of ski boots, with both of those there was a seam and it caused the chafing in the middle of the back of the foot (you can see the residual scarring as a dark patch of skin in the picture). So even though I am completely heartbroken that I can’t get rid of this problem, I am a little bit optimistic that I could prevent the chafing by using surgical tape. I also need to test with other socks. But that has to wait, because right now I can’t wear any kind of boots!

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I realise that the foot picture is ugly in many different ways, and the black fibres left behind by the sock don’t make it better. But you understand that I’m not very keen on dipping my foot in water right now?