You may not have been aware of it, but apparently Australia is currently gripped in an epidemic – nay, a pandemic! – of ESD, known to laypersons as Expensive Sneaker Disease.
Podiatrists and enthusiasts in the podiatry arts are warning that people are doing shoes wrong and need to be put their best foot forward, clad in footwear which actually does the job it’s being required to do.
These ones, specifically.
It’s the weird inverse of people wearing sneakers as a fashion statement: where once upon a time people would wear athletic footwear just to gad about the place, now manufacturers are making sneakers purely as a fashion statement and people are accidentally mistaking them for sneakers they can do sport and sports-adjacent stuff in.
The upshot is that people are getting their little piggies injured, particularly by wearing non-gym shoes to the gym..
It’s especially problematic for women, since they’ve been historically underserved in the athletic footwear department and therefore more like to take what’s on offer than have a super-wide choice
Chickens have even fewer options.
“It’s really important that demographic aren’t picking shoes more for when they are going for a coffee than to the gym,” Melbourne podiatrist Lewis Citroen told the Age. So wait: getting coffee doesn’t count as cardio?
Anyway, the lesson here is clear: either choose your shoes better, or don’t exercise. Either works.