Intuition Dreamliner Boot Liner

By this time, my still scent-free Dreamliners were ready to be molded to my feet. I put on my usual ski socks and Charley gave me foam “toe caps” to provide extra wiggle room in the toe box. Then I slid my feet into a sensuous warm pudding. I asked Charlie for the crudest comment anyone had ever made about this feeling, but he declined to go there. (Boot fitting is serious business.) I was buckled in, then told to flex a few times and stand for ten minutes as the foam molded to my foot. I could still feel the pleasing warmth as Charlie warned, “Don’t get too used to it. They’ll never feel that good again.”

And how. My first mistake, in a series of unfortunate events, was to assume that now that everything was perfectly pattern matched, I had liberty to crank down on my buckles like I had always yearned to do. I jumped the little cornice into Stauffenberg—and felt immediate loss of backward boot flex.

Failing to realize that I had not switched out of walk mode in my unfamiliar Cochises, I further cranked on my third buckle and power strap. By the time I reached the bottom of the run, my arches were screaming and my calves lowing (or whatever sound traumatized calves make.) I fiddled for a few more runs, but the damage was done. I finally was forced to pull into the pits to replace the Dreamliners with the stock Cochise liners.

Fatal mistake #2: At this point, I forgot to grab the stock foot beds out of the Intuitions. Ergo, for the rest of the day, I wasn’t skiing so much as swimming laps in my boots. By day’s end, when I hobbled back to The Boot Doctors, both pairs of liners in tow, my ankle bones were hugely swollen from the abuse of bouncing against the walls.

“Wow,” commented Charlie. “I’m surprised those (my ankle bones) don’t have moons.”

I related my day of travails.

“Well, there’s no cure for stupidity,” he commented in his best bed-side manner. “But for fallen arches, we have the answer.”

Orthotics, of course. So I succumbed, and we rebooted the program, this time kicking it off with heat-molded Instaprint foot beds. As the Dreamliners reheated so they could be remolded to the new foot beds, I idly wondered if they could be made to accommodate a skier friend who was trying to get his boot on over a house-arrest ankle bracelet.

This should have tipped me off that my swollen ankle bones (which Charlie no doubt considered a permanent birth defect) would eventually subside and leave slop in their wake.

Which begs an important question: How many times can you heat an Intuition liner without compromising the molecular cross linkage that prevents gas migration between cells? (“Packing out,” to you and me.) Intuition says  “several times,” but boot fitters I talked to swear that slightly more space is created around the foot after each reheating.

I did feel that the fit was not quite as tight the second time, although there was that ankle issue complicating the experiment. A few days later, I added a layer of Bontex and ankle wrap pads to prevent uplift. I’m pretty much solid underfoot now (thanks to the orthotics) and tucked in snugly everywhere else. My toes are warm and seemingly hard-wired to my ski tips. I’ve stopped over-cinching the top buckles, because even if I can’t exactly feel that plushy foam, I’ve gained faith through numerous hard turns that it’s there doing its job.

But with so many variables in play, boot fitting remains a personal work-in-progress. (I have a friend who stayed in a monogamous, but not maintenance-free, civil union with his Nordicas for seventeen years.) Time will tell if my Intuitions, once dialed in, will hold their integrity and lead to years of harmony down below.

I do know one thing: when it comes to orthotics, save yourself some pain and listen to the boot doctor. And listen sooner rather than later.