MoonMan wrote:
VtSkier wrote:

Monique Y. Mudama wrote:


snip

From a long time ago, when most boots were soft and the flex was not
consistent because they were made of leather, I (and probably
everybody else) used to buckle them as tight as we could just to have
control. I would actually wear out a pair of boots in a year or less.
There was just nothing left for support by March. I would suffer
every day that I went out with foot cramps, coming especially from
the outside of my arches. My bunions weren't so bad then, but the
shape was still pretty much out of the norm and therefore away from
standard boot lasts. Tighten as much as possible for the run and
unbuckle in excruciating pain as we stopped at the bottom to ride the
lift. Standard procedure. I still see people doing this and I'm sure
it's due to boots which don't fit right and/or are too soft. It's
often people in low-end rental type boots that show this behavior.


Racers do as well as they crank the boots up ridiculousely tight to get
better control.

Many do - not all - some racers (even at a high level) are able to get
boots fitted well enough that tightness and pain are not synonymous (I'm
mainly talking of current US WC skiers I watched when they were
teenagers. Some unbuckled because of pain - some unbuckled because it
was cool, and some didn't bother - didn't seem to be a direct
correlation to winning, either, or to eventually skiing in the circus.)

In any case the topic is recreational skiers - IMO their boots should
never hurt enough to require unbuckling - not even on extended breaks
like lunch - you put them on in the morning, you take them off when
you're done for the day - they stay on during the day. If unbuckling
relieves pain, get back to the shop that sold them and demand adjustments.

Those leather boots were a big hassle - the leather would get wet, the
soles would warp, the boots'd get looser during a day of skiing as the
leather stretched, they needed constant waxing. When you removed them
they had to immediately be clamped onto a boot-tree so the sole could
dry flat - ah, those were the days when skiing was skiing and men were
men and women were bunnies, and palms of your gloves were ripped from
rope burns. I miss those days. Hell, I miss yesterday - carpe diem!