By a Thread: Slim Margins
The following was meant to be a short - bang it out - piece on an obscure and "trivial piece of equipment, the Saran footbed. In the end, it seemed to run away from me, turning into the all too common death loop of online writing, a constant feedback loop of write, edit, write, edit, add-in, edit, rewrite, repeat. It starts as one thing, then becomes another, and ends up as something else. I often bin such work after a week of getting both someone and nowhere, but instead, I thought I’d just post it as it is, as it’s more about the parts of its sum than the sum of its parts.
Sir Dave Brailsford was well known as a proponent of marginal gains in pro cycling, numerous small improvements in various aspects of a cyclist's performance to achieve significant overall gains. He believed that if they could make small improvements in multiple areas, such as equipment, training, nutrition, recovery, and even personal habits, the cumulative effect would lead to significant performance improvements. In the end, it turned out that many such gains in the sport of pro cycling were not from rounder wheels or weighing your urine but from harder-to-detect performance-enhancing drugs. Nevertheless, the concept of multiple marginal gains is a solid one.
I suppose in my own sport, I’ve always been a bit of a marginal gains nerd and have made a career out of looking at things at a granular level in order to squeeze out an advantage.
There is also a kind of gain, maybe called a not-so-margina-gain, in which something appears to be marginal or even irrelevant but on closer inspection, has a profound effect.
For example, most people would consider the difference between a Berghaus Polartech 200 fleece and a Helly Hansen fibre pile jacket as marginal, if not the same. Perhaps the Berghaus jacket is better, as fleece is a newer technology, plus it’s universal, while the pile jacket is scruffy and industrial looking and uncommon these days. If you’re throwing either one on at a picnic, the difference would be hard to notice, but if you were working on the deck of a trawler off the coast of Greenland, one would decrease your risk of hypothermia dramatically more than the other (hint, it’s not the trendy one). Both things do the same job; they insulate, but when you dig down into how they function, the marginal difference in the structure of the fibres and knit, one gives the user a significant comfort/survival advantage.
The reason why potential marginal and not-so-marginal gains are overlooked comes down to many factors. Sometimes a groundbreaking product is poorly promoted or lacks clout or funds for marketing to the people who need it (all outdoor entrepreneurs should read Peter Thiel's 'Zero to One' to avoid this mistake). Sometimes it might be because a product or technology is ahead of its time before the world or technology was ready and perhaps needs to be rediscovered.
This would include a market that is unwilling to pay the necessary price for an innovative product (trying selling a £800 Arcteryx Alpha SV jacket or an £11,000 carbon fibre road bike in 1983) but which slowly ups the price it's willing to pay for innovation. Then there are products that, although far superior in some respect to everything else on the market, suffer from being outside of the dominant design envelope. Such products tend to only ever achieve a dedicated cultish following, often because they cannot tap into the shared marketing spend of the dominant design (think Paramo versus Goretex). And then there are products, and the gains they offer, that get overlooked because they appear as exciting as shoelaces or tax law. But, like tax law, such things can have a profound effect on your life – either way – if you try and understand what they do.
A good example of this last category of marginal gains would be the humble and oft-forgotten footbed, nothing but a slice of stinky foam in your footwear sandwich. But if we were to spend a little time digging deeper into the history of footbeds or insoles (I tend to view a footbed as removable and customisable and an isole as fixed), could you gain some marginal advantage?
Mountain Footbeds
The market for high-end footbeds is huge in the skiing and sports fitness industry, even in cycling, with companies like Superfeet and Sidas having annual revenues in the tens of millions of dollars. Then there is the podiatry sector, which is worth billions annually, foot trouble – like all trouble businesses – being a good business to be in.
But when it comes to mountaineering, interest in footbeds has traditionally been limited. For most outdoor users, it’s a hard sell to get a customer to drop £75 on a set of custom footbeds when they’ve just dropped £350 on a new pair of boots; after all, shouldn’t that £350 include the best footbed money can buy?
For most outdoor shops, the only people who are attracted to such after-market footbeds are people with 'difficult feet', which is an outdoor retail code for difficult people.
Climbers who are also skiers and have already invested in custom footbeds – because skiing has a culture in which dropping that extra £75 is the norm – will often switch one set of footbeds from skiing boots to climbing boots (ski boot footbeds tend to be one size too small for mountain boots, so you need to trim off £5 off the footbed to fit), or even make use of heated footbeds for the coldest days.
But for the rest, we just use what comes in the boot.
What do all these other sports know that outdoor users don't, or are they all just suckers, pliable to the hard sell or the upsell of boot salesman, easy for the upgrade, the optional features? Or do they recognise the footbed as a crucial interface between the user and their footwear and between the footwear and the ground you're on?
And, what about people who work in extreme environments, such as jungles or arctic tundra, who invest time and thought into specialised footbeds, far from the Drum and Base din of a ski shop and dreadlocked salesman patter?
A brief history of Footbeds
As long as humans have been wearing things on their feet, people have been using some form of footbed, be it grass and straw, wool, or animal fur. The Greeks and Romans, and Egyptians would line the soles of their sandals with straw in order either to give more cushioning or for warmth, while the Northern people living in the arctic regions used dry grass inside their soft seal or reindeer hide boots, like the mukluk, guksi and Kamik. If you wanted to move around in the cold, even stave off frostbite, which would kill you, and perhaps your whole tribe or clan, then what you put under your feet was more than just an afterthought.
I expect the first technical custom footbeds would also have come from Northern peoples several millennia ago, made from felted reindeer or caribou wool. Such a footbed would be more comfortable to wear and provide more effective insulation than grass or animal skins when compressed, and would not disintegrate as quickly (think steel wool vs human hair).
Leather
Shoes and boots, as we know them now, only really appeared in the 16th century, and most people either wore some kind of foot wrapping, sandals, clogs or just went barefoot (they dressed like hippies). It was only during the industrial revolution, when people began to move from the country to cities – where bare footedness was not optimal – and footwear could be mass-produced, did leather shoes and boots become common among all classes. My mother told me she had to go to school in the 1950s without shoes, so a pair of shoes was still a big investment, and perhaps one not made for fast-growing feet (I was shod in wellies, cheap, plastic for most of my early years for the same reason).
Leather footwear quality varied greatly, but I expect even a cheap pair of shoes or boots in the 19th century was still of higher quality due to craftsmanship and leather tanning than a pair of £1000 shoes today. This is one reason why the cobbler played a vital role in society, as the maintenance of a person’s footwear was the modern equivalent of the maintenance of a car. Without your shoes, you became part of the beggar class.
Originally, boots and shoes made from leather had the insole sewn in as part of the boot construction (sole, midsole, insole). Being leather, this construction would rapidly take up the wearer's foot shape, creating a custom fit, with the weight of the foot also compressing the midsole and even the sole over time (also known as “breaking in your boots”). It’s worth noting that early leather footwear did not come in left or right (which was lucky, as most people didn’t know left from right either), but simply became that way by the action of the foot wearing in the leather.
This breaking-in period for heavy-duty boots was traditionally sped up by urinating into the boots before you went to bed, pouring them out, and then wearing them the next day (unless you worked in the grape treading sector). This unconventional approach no doubt worked due to wetting leather that might have dried out due to long storage and introducing urea and ammonia to the leather, both key in the tanning process. I expect the part of the boot most affected by this approach would be the insole, as it would help to speed up the compression and custom forming of the leather.
As a side note, pissing in your boots or feet seems to work at keeping fungus away when boots or feet can’t dry out or you have no treatment at hand for fungal infections like athlete’s foot.
The downsides of a leather insole, rather than a removable footbed, included very slow drying time and the difficulty in repairing heavy wear and tear, as unlike a removable insole that could be replaced when it’s holed, this would require the boot to be taken apart (leather would last far longer, but would still wear out).
A leather insole is also a haven for bacteria and fungus and general boot rotting nastiness, which is why cleaning a leather boot inside and out used to be the done thing.
There was also some extra cost involved in a leather insole, as this had to be good quality, thick leather, and doing away with it allowed non-leather midsoles to be more easily used, including cardboard, cork, and later nylon/plastic.
In terms of footbeds, during this period, which went from the 16th century to the mid-20th, I expect the primary use for some form of inserted footbed was to carry out a running repair of a shoe by inserting a flat piece of material into the shoe when they got holes in them, the most common being a piece of newspaper.
The only interesting footbed example of this time was the practice of new army recruits putting straw in their right boot and hay in the left. Warfare at the time was based on manoeuvring blocks or lines of men around the battlefield, but for men who could not read or write or know left from right, this was a problem. By putting straw in one boot, and hay in the other, the drill instructors could teach them how to march and fight, shouting “straw, hay, straw, hay” rather than “left, right, left, right”.