#168: Lacelets

I’ve been experimenting with a variety of different lacing patterns for my battered old New Balance trainers. I find that even though these are ‘H’ width fitting, my feet can still become seriously uncomfortable as they hammer the pavement and squish sideways. (I happen to have short, ultra broad feet with a very high instep).

In the end, I settled for a normal ladder type lacing pattern across the upper half of my shoes and no laces at all across the bottom half.

This actually works surprisingly well; holding the footwear in place whilst still allowing my feet to do their sideways squish on impact. It could still be better though.

Today’s invention is to make running shoes which have, say, eight sets of opposed laceholes, as usual, but instead of having one continuous lace per shoe, provide the wearer with eight separate lace loops. Each loop would join two opposite holes but provide 8 independent tensions across the foot. The loops could be held firm by a smaller variant on existing lace locks.

Although perhaps slightly more fiddly to tie up, these lacelets could provide a much more ‘tailored’ fit. For perfectionists, they might even be made available in different elasticities for different positions on each foot.