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Odd Observations
Home›Odd Observations›Do Your Feet Get Bigger When You Move to the Desert?

Do Your Feet Get Bigger When You Move to the Desert?

By Andrea Aker
February 5, 2010
5135
6

Excerpt from Valley 101: A Slightly Skewed Guide to Living in Arizona, a collection of Clay Thompson’s columns for The Arizona Republic. (Originally published May 14, 2000.)

Here at Valley 101 headquarters, white-coated lab technicians have been working round-the-clock to answer one of the greatest questions ever to cross the Valley 101 transom:

Do your feet get bigger when you move to the desert?

You know, we spent hours flipping pancakes, doing day labor, weeding soybeans to get through college, followed by years of crawling over the broken reputations of colleagues and competitors to arrive at a place of relative safety in journalism, and it comes to this: Do your feet get bigger when you move to the desert?

But we digress.

Hours of research, misinterpreted by some of our less-polished masters as watching Cubs games, failed to produce a firm scientific yes or no.

However, anecdotal evidence from readers, some of whom surely have an extra chromosome, has flooded in. A common theory: sandals. For example, this from a reader who claims to be “M. Hamilton’’: “Since I moved here three years ago, my feet have grown a half shoe size. Some of my friends have suggested that it’s because people here tend to wear sandals, which spreads out your feet.”

Class: Do you people actually sit around the Valley 101 student union discussing your feet? “Speaking of campaign finance reform, my feet are getting huge.”

Reader David Valentine offers this idea: “It is the natural job of feet to sweat. Due to the lack of humidity in this region, feet are prevented from doing their normal job. (This) causes the subcutaneous tissue to swell, therefore expanding the cutaneous tissue resulting in an expansion of the foot.”

Okey-dokey.

Next: Does working for a newspaper make your brain smaller?

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6 comments

  1. TerryR 16 February, 2010 at 08:35 Reply

    Yes.

  2. lance praet 6 August, 2011 at 12:16 Reply

    this is asinine

  3. SaraD 1 February, 2012 at 07:50 Reply

    Back in Ye Olden Days, when I actually subscribed to a physical newspaper, Clay Thompson was always the best part of it. Thanks for regifting his columns. He once even answered a question I sent him, but it was so long ago that I’ve forgotten what it was. Perhaps I’ll see it here someday. The question is,.. will my feet be bigger when I do?

  4. Andrea Aker 2 February, 2012 at 10:00 Reply

    Thanks for reading Sara! You know Clay still has a column in the AZ Republic. Lots of fun and quirky stuff!

  5. Marilyn T 23 February, 2014 at 20:36 Reply

    I doubt it…my feet get much bigger (via swelling) when I’m back EAST, where it’s humid. Here, not only are my shoes & sandals always loose, but so are my rings. I’ve been here full time 7 years now, so you’d think it would’ve happened by now.

  6. Kristin 6 February, 2016 at 17:52 Reply

    I’ve lived in Arizona almost my whole life. I moved to the Caribbean and only wore shoes to go to church and to the store and I did a lot of barefoot walking – for two years. When it came time to move back to Arizona, my favorite tennis shoes that I brought with me (but never wore in the Caribbean), no longer fit me. My guess is that my feet spread out.

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