Ski Injuries Suck. Why Am I Fond of My Beat-Up Feet, Then?

I’ve been noticing holes in my socks lately. They all look the same and are in the same place: a small, dime-shaped opening where my heel meets the fabric. Similar wear appears in one pair of well-loved slip-ons, which have developed canyon-shaped ruts in the back that two slightly misshapen feet slot into.

Skiing is the problem, I think. Since my parents first dragged a smaller version of myself into the mountains decades ago, my feet have spent thousands of hours slamming into and rubbing against the walls of hard plastic boots that may or may not have been three sizes smaller than my street shoes, which I already prefer tight. 

I considered interviewing a foot expert for this article, but thanks to the internet, I can guess what they’d say. “You probably have Haglund’s deformity. And if you were thinking about cursing the universe and how it delivered you a divine stroke of bad luck, let me make one thing clear: maybe genetics played a role, but this wasn’t fate. What was your favorite hobby again? That’s right. You were asking for it, pal. Also, try being less dramatic.“

Fair enough. One risk factor for developing the globular, heel-based mounds is wearing “tight, narrow shoes,” the internet says. That may be understating what I like to do with my feet in my spare time. Either way, guilty as charged. Haglund’s deformity is also known as a “pump bump” because, apparently, they make wearing high heels especially painful. I’ve learned the same can be true of ski boots, creating a vicious cycle. You put on the boots. They inflame the bastard bump. It grows angrier. You put them back on because you can’t stop skiing.

One morning, in the parking garage, I came undone. My little bumps were screaming. Modest shin pressure, let alone the forces of a glorious, teeth-rattling trip through a mogul field, would send my feet into a frenzy as they met immovable polyurethane. Barely of age and prone to catastrophizing at the time, I assumed this was it. Would I have to give up skiing and become, heaven forbid, an avid frolfer? (Author’s note: I actually love frolf.) Hitting the deformity over and over with books—a supposed and definitely ineffective home remedy that, yes, I tried one night in a dorm room—hadn’t worked. I wasn’t and still am not brave enough to break out the angle grinder. I considered surgery, but that risked taking a winter off.

Mercy eventually arrived in the form of new boots. They were a bit bigger and made skiing trickier. But thankfully, aside from the occasional firm landing, the bumps stopped bothering me too much. Now, I just go through socks and shoes a little faster than the average person and have even begun to develop an odd fondness for the interlopers.

They aren’t the only traces the mountains have left on me. Under my chin, there’s a faint white scar where hair doesn’t grow. Whenever I stare at myself in the mirror and carefully shave, I see it, and it brings me back to another moment years ago, when I toured a college friend around my home mountain. Zipping through the North Back gate and diving into a meadow of perfectly spaced trees, we came across the sort of cliff that attracts teenagers. Or, in other words, the landing was flat. You can guess what came next. My knee met my face, and there was blood involved. There are also the invisible remnants of a hairline fracture behind one of my ears—that’s another story, and it isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds—and a persistent crackle in my knees.

Each of these injuries brought pain, either acute or chronic. When I run my finger under my chin or go swimming and have to explain why my bare feet are growing in the wrong direction, though, I don’t dwell on the moments of impact. Those are parts of each story—and, admittedly, it’s fun to tell people about youthful lapses in judgment—but the marks mean more. 

They are the anxious but addicting buoyancy filling every one of your atoms as you holler down below, dropping!, and, after mucking it all up, use your front-facing camera to admire the gash and delusionally hope that somebody of the opposite sex you fancy notices it, asks about it, and decides, then and there, that you’re badass even though all you really did was crash on a small cliff. They are the spring slush, the warm parking lot blacktop, and the effervescent but vaguely bittersweet feeling that comes at the end of the season and makes almost anything seem possible, like backflipping that small jump you definitely shouldn’t. They are all the days you went out, thinking of yourself as a hardcore skier, to slide down bumpy snow, as the chafing between your foot and plastic grew something that may not have grown otherwise. They are signs that you went skiing. And, in ways big or small, they are inevitable.

Now, I can’t romanticize the sterner injuries. If the human body is a car, a blown knee is comparable to replacing the head gaskets in an old Subaru as it nears the dreaded 100,000-mile mark. That stuff sucks. Bad things don’t happen for a reason, and skiing would be more fun if we were all made of space-age materials that never cracked. But we aren’t, and my strain of foot nonsense is far from catastrophic. Instead, it’s best compared to a questionable, though still-functional clutch you appreciate precisely because it doesn’t work quite right. 

I can navigate around those bumps and, maybe perversely, take a little pride in having earned them the hard way. After all, as skiers, the patina many of us end up with means we actually drove off the lot and, like any good adventure, made a few wrong turns. Or, more accurately, enjoyed too many of the right ones.

Related: Early Morning Ski Commutes Aren’t Painful, They’re Glorious