How I Mash my Shoes

I'm at risk of becoming all about the dead people and that's not really me.  So here's a post about shoes.

I am hard on my shoes.  Always have been.  This may be something to do with having a difficult to find shoe size - once I find  a pair that fit well I wear them to death.  There was the pair of jodhpur boots bought in Australia that I wore from the age of eight until they were a size or two too small and I had worn a hole all the way through the sole, or the huge boy's leather schoolshoes that wound up as a soft heap of leather and a worn-through sole, the Mountain Horse boots I've now had for about 12 years, with their replacement footbeds and worn through lining that I still take up the occasional hill or the Birkenstocks I glued back together with epoxy last week to get me through another summer or two.

I walk places.  To and from work, around town, down to the beach.  And over enough time that wear shoes out.  But I noticed a few months after I bought my bicycle that a number of my pairs of shoes were gaining wear in a specific spot:

It's really obvious on the two pairs of mary janes to the left, but you can also see a dull patch on the 'snakeskin' heels and extensive scuffing on the boots.

I've somehow managed to repeatedly graze the ball of my foot with the crank of my bicycle pedals.  I'm guessing this is because my feet tend to turn in when I'm not thinking about it - cycling means I'm thinking about a lot of other things with a lot more urgency.  I haven't noticed other folk bemoaning the mashing of their shoes by errant bicycles, so maybe it's just me.