What on Earth is “Shanatomy”, you say? Well, as I’ve been looking for projects to do on my blog here, I’ve come up with the idea of doing a weekly Shoe Anatomy, shortened to my own term “Shanatomy”, blog each Thursday to keep climbers up on what they should know about the different parts of their climbing (and occasionally approach) shoes and how they function to make the experience of climbing one to celebrate from the ground up! If I had to define the philosophy of Shanatomy, I’d say the reference would be something like, “Know thy shoes.” After all, your climbing shoes are an extension of your body while you’re climbing, and probably your most important piece of gear! If I had to pick only one piece of gear to climb with, it’d be my climbing shoes!!! That said, I’m going to dissect this topic for us, week-by-week, so that those who are less knowledgable or in need of some help with the topic can learn something, and those that already know everything can either correct me, laugh at my posts, or simply have a good time reading what I’ve written about the Shanatomy of the week! Let’s get to it!
For this first post on Shanatomy, I’d like to give an overview of the climbing shoe. It has a sole made of rubber, a last, a rand, a toe box, an upper, the fastening system, a heel cup, a material or materials that the upper and insole are made out of, a midsole, a lining (or not), a tongue, and some other specialty features that you see on some shoes, depending on their purpose and the design of the shoe. A good resource if you need thorough answers fast can be found at http://www.climbingshoebeta.com and you won’t be disappointed with the articles on different shoes because they give some really thorough pros and cons in their articles, along with some video reviews. They also give a really good list of resolers so that you can get the extra mileage out of your shoes that you paid for!!!
Well, that’s the lowdown on what the (hopefully) weekly Thursday post that you can look forward to will be, along with whatever other posts hit me just right or happen to come up. I hope you get something from the information presented, and if there are any errors, please be sure to point them out to me! I want the information on my blog to be accurate so that people can rely on it!!! Thanks for being one of my readers! I appreciate you! Take care, climb hard, and I’ll see you soon!
CLIMBING 4 THE REST OF US 