They are the workhorse of your running life. Yet we often neglect them, we don't pay attention and take care of them how they should be. What am I talking about? Your feet, of course. So today I want to give you three tips to take care of your feet so they can take care of you.
Welcome to the channel, another episode of Runner's High, I'm Jesse Funk, the host of this show and the owner of Solpri, where we're going to dive a little bit into some of the things we do here in the company. And that is skincare taking care of your skin, taking care of your feet and all the things that are involved with that. So one of the things we don't really think about is how I take care of my feet.
We often think about it when we have pains, right? When we're like, Oh, I've got plantar fasciitis or my Achilles hurts, or I stubbed my toe on something, but everything is going well. Hmm. Do we really think about it? No, we don't. And I think generally speaking, as a culture, it's changing a little bit. But we as men, if you're a man, I guess I don't know because I'm talking to a camera or particularly bad at it.
Women are generally better at self-care than we as men are, but hopefully we're changing the wheels a little bit, being a little more, you know, preventive in that nature. So what are the issues that can crop up with your feet? Well, there are a lot of things that can crop up, but some of the things that we deal with at Solpri, we kind of specialize in sweat in the effects that sweat have on you in general or your feet in particular.
So we have a whole series of products called the Shield series that deals with fungus, which is not really a fun thing to talk about. But I did shoot a fun commercial with my friend Brian on the channel. If you go to the main channel page, I think it's still the main thing. If not, you can search on YouTube for Shield Shield, soap, commercial or something like that.
That brings a little humor to the subject, but it's something that happens to a lot of us because our feet are sweaty there and sweaty socks all the time. And it's not even necessarily, hey, I went to the gym and stepped on something and then got fungus, which is kind of the catch in the video that I shot with my friend, Brian. But it's that sometimes the bacteria, the good bacteria that are skin overgrow because of the environment that they're in. All of that sweat.
So we have a shield series that deals with that, in particular for feet. We make something like this. This is our salt soak. So it has those kind of foam fighting essential oils in it and then also has a couple of different salts, including Epsom salt, which is not technically a salt and Dead Sea salt.
And those things help rehydrate some of the skin on your feet and get some of those nutrients in to deal with calluses and soften those calluses up if you've built them up on your feet. The other thing that you need to worry about with your feet and you'll know it immediately is if you're going to get any kind of hot spots and blisters, which is why we make something like this, which is our natural anti-chafe balm. So if you want to check those out, you're interested in those solpri.com/shop down here on the screen below. Unfortunately, you can't make the screen clickable, but tuck that in solpri.com/shop.
But there are other things that you can do that don't necessarily involve buying products from us, although I obviously would appreciate it. So let's talk about what else you can do to take care of your feet. And one of the biggest things that you can do for yourself is actually a preventive measure, and that is get proper fitting shoes and don't wear too tight of shoes. You might been thinking, Jesse, isn't that the same thing? Aren't you saying the same thing? And yeah, I could see how you might say that.
But let me talk about it because I actually see it as two separate issues. And the reason I see it as two separate issues is because we have different pairs of shoes for different reasons, right? So maybe not all of us, but if you come from a competitive background you ran in school or, you know, you're in any kind of tune with what's going on in the larger running community. You probably have multiple pairs of shoes.
So first, getting a proper fitting shoe prevents, you know, calluses and blisters to begin with, although you can obviously use an anti-chafe balm if it's still in there, you know, rubbing in a certain area and you just can't get around it because of how your foot is shaped. But there is the case of racing shoes, right? And this is where I say, OK, we've got a proper fitting shoe to train in. But when it comes to racing, sometimes people's brains get ahead of themselves and they think lighter is better.
Lighter is better, which is true to some degree, and it depends on what distance you're racing to is how much cushioning you need, how light the shoes should be compared to your trainer, those kind of things. So if you ran a school, you've seen things like these, these are spikes, some spikes on the bottom. You use these in cross-country. Or in college, you'll use these in track. I don't think they're allowed in most high school track meets, though. Maybe that's changing.
I know there are a number of people that would say, OK, this is a very lightweight shoot like these in particular. I think we four ounces somewhere around there.
There's not much to this shoe. And so they would take that and they'd say, I'm going to size down a half size from what I would normally wear to cut off even more weight. The problem with that is that now you're probably going to screw up your feet pretty bad and they're going to swell throughout the race. They're really not going to fit. That's probably going to adjust your biomechanics a little bit. And you have shaved off a fractional ounce for what is probably going to be a much larger detriment to your feet.
It can be not always. It also can be that when you're wearing too tight of shoes, you can end up with misshapen toes, hammertoes, things like that. It is not always the case of tight shoes. Sometimes it's genetic. Getting bunions, in particular, is often a genetic thing, not necessarily a shoe thing, though it can be correlated.
So making sure you are training in proper fitting shoes and also racing in proper fitting shoes that aren't too tight. It's going to be one of the three main pillars of that skin, you know, foot routine to take care of your feet. So again, starting off, we've got all of our skin care stuff that we can do to take care of any issues that crop up or fungus or anything like that. Proper fitting shoes. Let's get on to number three and number three is kind of, as you'd expect, I'd hope, get good socks.
Now this is something that we talked about a lot. While we're in the shoe store and a lot of people go, Oh yeah, it's all about just selling more socks. And of course, a company wants to sell socks that sell socks. I don't sell socks, so you can buy socks wherever you want.
But it is often the case that some kind of sock that is going to help pull moisture away from your foot is going to help prevent issues down the line. And that includes some of those fungal things that happen that we deal with at my company. So maybe I should be promoting wearing bad socks. So then you could get fungus issues and buy solutions for me. But that's not that's not the situation.
So there are all kinds of different fibers you can get. Athletic socks, they often come with polyester and synthetic fibers of some sort. They're designed to pull moisture away from your skin. And again, that's because when you leave that sweat on your skin for too long, it's not allowed to be pulled away and then evaporate. It can result in, you know, fungal issues, which is no fun for anybody.
But along that line, too, if your feet are waterlogged from sweat in the summertime when it's really hot, I have a whole system called the squish factor in terms of do my feet feel squishy? Can I hear the shoes squish and then can somebody else hear the shoes squish on me? That's the one, two and three levels of the squish factor you want to avoid number three at all costs.
Number two where you can hear it yourself. Pretty bad. And then number one, or you just feel a little squishy. You know, it's super hot. You're just dying of sweat. That's where you really need that good sock because it's doing a lot of work to get that moisture away from your skin. Because what else happens? Blisters. And that's where that bomb comes into play, where that's going to help prevent some of those blisters and really kind of wet, humid, sticky situations.
But if you don't have that extra nice sock also working for you, then it's going to become even harder to move away from the situation where you potentially end up with fungus issues and more likely, those, you know, blisters that are going to develop on your feet, which may become calloused as it depends on where they are, but they're going to be painful to deal with in the interim.
As mentioned, there are lots of different kinds of socks if you want to go au naturel, so to speak. There's a particular kind of sheep, the merino sheep, often as far as I know, they live in New Zealand. Maybe they live someplace else, but they're wool is really nice because it's good for hot and cold weather, and it's kind of naturally moisture-wicking. So there are a number of companies that make merino wool socks.
They are not cheap. I will say that upfront. And the reason is probably a supply and demand thing. There's a lot of demand and not a ton of supply in relative terms. So if you're going to go that route, ask for some for Christmas. Buy yourself a pair like once a month, maybe, and kind of collect them over time. If you want to wear those otherwise you're looking at athletic socks, there are again tons and tons of brands.
Many shoe manufacturers make nice socks as well athletic socks, running shoe manufacturers. So check out those brands, but you want to find something besides just that white cotton sock that you probably grew up with to run in.
So those are my three tips for taking care of your feet. Use good skincare routines like Salt Soaks, Anti-Chafe Balm, and that kind of stuff again. Solpri.com/shop if you want to check that out from us, get proper fitting shoes. Do not wear too tight of shoes when you're racing, even though it is a short period of time and wear socks meant for running that can pull moisture away from your feet.
Do you have any questions for me about running anything, running related or even triathlon related? I've done videos on that before too leave them in the comments below. I'd love to do a video for you in the future. I'll see you next time on the next episode of Runner's High.