GetWildNest ad: I did the thumb test on my insoles.

If you're on your fifth pair of insoles and your second or third cortisone shot, you need to read this. Because for 9 years I've kept a bottle of ibuprofen in the door pocket of my truck, and most mornings I'd taken 4 before I clocked in. I'm 58 years old. I've been a maintenance mechanic at the same bottling plant for 27 years, every one of them on a concrete floor. I weigh 270 and I'm on my feet 10 hours a shift. Mornings were the worst of it. The alarm went off at 4:40 and I'd sit on the edge of the bed for a full minute before I put my feet down. The first step was a nail through each heel. I got to the bathroom on the outside edges of my feet, holding the dresser and then the door frame. It eased up once I was moving, and the 4 in the truck bought me until about 2 o'clock. Then it was back, and it stayed. I'd be standing at the capper with the guard off, shifting my weight from one foot to the other every minute, with 2 and a half hours still on the clock. I figured that's what 27 years on concrete does to a man. It wasn't for lack of trying to fix it. It started with Dr. Scholl's, the heavy duty ones, $15 at Walmart. They felt good for about 2 weeks. I bought them 4 times before I quit. The podiatrist's office sold me PowerSteps for $50. Those made it a month. A guy at the boot store put me in Superfeet, the green ones, $55. The arch was gone in 5 weeks. Then I paid $400 for custom orthotics and waited 3 weeks for them. They were hard as a rock and they hurt worse than the cheap ones. I wore them for 2 months anyway because of what they cost. I did the stretches on the bottom stair every morning and every night. I rolled a frozen water bottle under my foot in front of the TV. I slept in a night splint for 3 nights and that was all I could take of it. The first cortisone shot gave me 3 good months. I told my wife it was fixed. After that I went for a second one, which gave me 5 weeks. Every one of those insoles is still in a drawer in my garage. I added it up one night. $565, and that's before the copays. In March I went in for shot number 3. She gave me the shot, and while I was putting my sock back on she told me it was the last one she would put in that heel. Too many of them thin out the pad under the heel and can rupture the fascia, and then I'd have a bigger problem than the one I came in with. I asked her what comes after the shots and she said surgery. They cut part of the fascia loose to take the tension off it, and I'd be off my feet for 6 weeks and off the floor for 3 months or more. I asked her what the odds were. She said 50/50 at best that I'd come out of it pain free. Then she told me, the same as she had on every visit, that it would help if I lost some weight. I'd been hearing that for 9 years, and I still had to be on that floor at 6 the next morning. I already knew what that surgery looked like because of Ray. Ray ran the palletizer on second shift and had the release done on his left foot 4 years ago. He was out for 5 months. He came back on light duty and lasted 2 weeks, because the arch on that foot had dropped flat and he couldn't stand on it past lunch. He took disability at 56 and I haven't seen him at the plant since. I'm 58 and I need 7 more years on that floor to get my full pension. I sat in her parking lot for a good 20 minutes before I started the truck. 2 days later a man on my own crew showed me something in the break room that no doctor had shown me in 9 years. His name is Walt. He's 61, he was a millwright at that plant before I got there, and he's a bigger man than I am. I had worked beside him for years and never once thought about the fact that he doesn't limp. He walks the whole line and climbs the stairs to the second floor a dozen times a shift, and at 3 o'clock he's moving the same as he was at 6. I was sitting in the break room with my boots unlaced under the table when he sat down across from me. "You're walking worse than you were last week," he said. "I was at the foot doctor Tuesday." "What'd they tell you?" I told him all of it. The last shot, the surgery, the 50/50. "They tell you to lose weight?" "Every time I go." "Mine told me the same thing for 6 years," he said. "I'm 290. I was 290 then too, and I haven't been back to him since 2022." I asked him what he did about it and he didn't answer that. He said, "There's nothing wrong with your feet, and it's got nothing to do with what you weigh. You did everything they told you to do. Take your boot off." I pulled my boot off and he reached in and took the insole out. It was a pair of VALSOLE heavy duty I'd bought on Amazon for $30, and I'd had them in for 3 weeks. "Looks brand new, doesn't it," he said. It did. He laid it on the table and pushed his thumb down into the heel, hard, and then took his hand away. The dent stayed there. He did the same thing under the arch and that one stayed too. The thing was 3 weeks old and I could see both of his thumbprints in it from across the table. "That's every pair in your drawer," he said. "Same foam, made for a man who weighs 150. It holds for 2 weeks and then it takes a set, same as an old gasket. Looks fine. Won't spring back. Won't hold anything up." I have pulled a thousand gaskets that had taken a set and thrown every one of them in the trash. I had never once looked at the thing in my boot the same way. "But here's the part they never showed you," he said. "Now take your sock off." I pulled my sock off. It was a work sock from a 6-pack at the plant store, the ones with "cushion" printed on the band, and I'd had this pair on 4 or 5 times. He took it and held the heel up to the fluorescent light over the table. I could see the light through it. "That's what's actually on your heel when it lands," Walt said. "Not the insole. The insole's under the floor of the boot. This is what's on you. Two layers of cotton with a puff of air spun in, and the air went flat on the third wash. You've been standing on the concrete through a sheet." Then he unlaced his own boot, pulled his own sock off and handed it to me. It was black, thin over the top of the foot, and the heel was a different thing entirely. There was a pad under it, thick and tight, worn dark the way anything is after a winter in a work boot. "I've had these on since October," he said. "5 months, same floor as you. Pinch the heel." I pinched it between my thumb and my finger as hard as I could, and I could not get my thumb and finger to meet. I pinched the heel of my own sock the same way and they met with nothing between them. "Yours quit on you the third wash," he said. "You've been standing on the concrete ever since." I asked him how that could be when the band said cushion. "The band can say whatever it wants," Walt said. "It's the same cotton they put in all of them, and cotton with air in it is made for a man who sits down. You and me put close to 300 pounds on that heel, every step, 10 hours a day. It holds for 3 washes and then it takes a set, same as the insole. It looks fine, but it won't spring back and it won't hold anything up." "That's half of it," he said. "You know that band that runs along the bottom of your foot, heel to toes? That's what's torn. Every step on this floor, your heel hits the concrete and the shock goes straight up into that band. Ten thousand steps a shift. The insole can't catch it, because the insole's under the boot, and the sock can't catch it, because the sock's a sheet. It knits a little overnight while you're off it, and then you get out of bed and rip it open again. That's your first step in the morning." "What about the shots?" "The shot is pulling the wire off the oil light. The light goes out and the engine's still running dry. Same with ibuprofen. You quit feeling it, so you went right on tearing it. Nothing you did was ever going to work with a dead sock on the heel." I asked him what he had on his feet. "GroundGuard," he said, and he spelled it for me. "You order them online. They come 6 to a pack." I told him I had $565 worth of insoles sitting in a drawer in my garage. I wasn't about to spend money on a pair of socks from a company I'd never heard of, off the internet, where I couldn't even pick one up and look at it first. "I said the same thing. I saw them on Facebook and figured it was a scam," he said. "You want to look at one, look at mine." He slid his sock back across the table. I went over it the way I'd go over a part. I turned it inside out, and the heel and the ball of the foot were knitted thick, a dense pad, and the rest of it was thin, with a mesh over the top of the foot. I pinched the pad again and leaned into it, and it came right back up. I tried the same thing on my plant-store sock and there was nothing to pinch. "Everything in this plant has a load rating stamped on it," Walt said. "The hoists, the racks, the forklifts. These were built the same way. A lab put a man's heel on a plate and measured it. 67 percent less of the hit gets to the heel. The pad's twice as dense as what's in yours, and it's on the foot where the heel lands, not under the floor of the boot. That's all it is. Somebody built one for the floor." "And what if mine go flat in a month like every other thing I've bought?" "Then you send them back. 99-day money back guarantee. I never sent mine back. I bought the 6 and there's a clean pair for every shift." I ordered them that night at the kitchen table. I had held a sock that was 5 months old and still doing its job, and nothing in my drawer had made it past 5 weeks. They came the following Tuesday. I put them on Wednesday morning and took my 4 ibuprofen in the truck, the same as always. They were firm under the heel, and they were nothing like a cushion sock. There was no lump, nothing bunching up in the boot, and thin over the top so my foot didn't cook. My heel sat down on a pad and stayed there, and for the first time in years it felt like there was something between me and the floor. At 2 o'clock my feet were tired from a day's work, and that was all they were. On Friday, day 3, I looked up at the clock over the capper and it was 3:40. I had not shifted my weight or checked that clock once since lunch. The next Monday I took 2 ibuprofen in place of the 4 and never noticed the difference. The mornings took longer, about 2 weeks. Then one day the alarm went off at 4:40 and I put my feet on the floor and walked to the bathroom. I was standing at the sink before it hit me that I hadn't sat on the edge of the bed and hadn't touched the dresser. There was no stabbing pain in my heel. I drove to work that morning and never opened the bottle. At 3 weeks, the point where every cheap pair in my drawer had quit, I pulled a sock off in the break room and pinched the heel. It came right back up. About 2 months in, I had it proven to me the hard way. I keep an old pair of boots in the garage for yard work, and on a Saturday in May I pulled them on with a pair of the plant-store socks out of the drawer, without thinking about it, and spent the morning cutting up a limb that had come down on my fence. By noon the stabbing pain was back in my right heel and I was limping to the house for lunch. On Sunday morning it was there again when I got out of bed, and I had to hold the dresser to get to the bathroom, the same as before. I hadn't felt that in 6 weeks, and it took one morning in dead socks to bring it back. Nothing else had changed that weekend. I had the same feet, the same boots and I weighed the same 270. The only thing different was what was on my heel. I put a pair of the GroundGuard on that afternoon and finished the fence. By Tuesday morning the pain was gone again. That week I ordered a second 6-pack so there would always be a clean pair, and I threw the plant-store socks in the trash with the gaskets. It's July now, and the first 6 have been in my work boots for 4 months, through the washing machine every week. I pinched the heel of one last week and it came right back up. For 9 years I came home from work, sat down in my chair and stayed there until bed, because I had nothing left in my feet for anything else. My wife walked the dog by herself every evening. In April I started going with them. We do a mile and a half after supper most nights now, out past the school and back. The second or third time I went, she said, "I walked this dog by myself for 9 years. I like this better." I also rebuilt the back steps I had been putting off for 3 summers, and I did it on a Saturday after a 50 hour week. In June I called the podiatrist's office and cancelled the appointment I had to talk about surgery. I'm 58, and I plan on walking out of that plant at 65 on my own two feet. The bottle of ibuprofen is still in the door pocket of my truck. I came across it last week when I was cleaning out the cab, and I could not tell you the last time I opened it. I'm writing this for the man I was in March. If you're on your fifth pair of insoles and your second or third cortisone shot, here is what I'd like you to do before you do anything else. Take your boot off, pull your sock off and hold the heel up to the light. Then pinch it as hard as you can. If you can see light through it, or your thumb and finger meet, that sock is dead, and it doesn't matter how new it looks or what the band said. You've been standing on the concrete through a sheet, and the tear in your foot has been opening back up every shift and every morning. There is nothing wrong with your feet, and it has nothing to do with what you weigh. You've been standing on cotton that was made for a man who sits down. From here you have 2 roads, and I've been far enough down the first one to tell you where it goes. You get the next shot and it wears off faster than the last one did. Then you're sitting in that office hearing about surgery and 50/50 odds, the way I was. Ray went down that road as far as it goes. Nobody ever sat him down in a break room and showed him what Walt showed me, and I've just shown it to you. The other road is a sock built for the floor you stand on, and 99 days to find out whether I'm telling you the truth. They're called GroundGuard, and you order them from the company's own website. Buy 3 pairs and they give you 3 free, so you get the 6. I bought 6 and ordered 6 more a month later, so learn from me and don't bother trying to make one pack stretch between your work boots and the pair you wear on the weekend. I know how it sounds, that a sock did what $565 of insoles and 3 shots couldn't, because I said it to Walt across a break room table. Then I went home and looked at $565 worth of insoles in a drawer, and not one of them had lasted me past 5 weeks. The pair on my feet right now is 4 months old. You get a 99-day money back guarantee. 99 days is more than 3 months, and no company gives a man 3 months on a sock unless they know it will still be holding him up at the end of it. Mine came in 5 days, and I ordered them as a one time purchase. Order a pack today and put them on the morning they show up. Then give them the 99 days and go by what your own feet tell you at 2 o'clock. P.S. Before you order anything, do the pinch test on the socks you're wearing right now. Pull one off and pinch the heel. If your thumb and finger meet, you already know why your feet hurt. P.P.S. 99-day money back guarantee. That's the whole guarantee, and it's longer than any cheap pair in my drawer ever lasted. P.P.P.S. These were built for a man who stands on a hard floor 10 hours a day. If you sit at a desk, they weren't built for you and you don't need them. If you're on that floor, they're the first thing I've ever put on my feet that was built for it.