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| My black PUMA sneakers - perfect for wearing to the office! |
For the past 10 years I have been wearing New Balance shoes for walking (well I do also have walking sandals, but ..), running, the gym and basically any activity I do. They were recommended to me by my physio, the people at the athletic shoe store who measured me and did various tests and one of our friends who's a podiatrist. Even with those three recommendations I wasn't convinced until I tried them on, I decided I was never even going to look at other athletic shoes as they were so comfortable.
Hello 2020 and I find myself the owner of a pair of PUMA Pacer Next sneakers, so what happened? Surprisingly, given the year we are in, it had nothing to do with Covid! I work as an Office Manager for an accounting firm and we moved from our long-standing one story office building to a two story office building a few months ago.
For the first couple of weeks I decided I was wearing my New Balance shoes as I was running up and down the stairs so many times while we were getting everything organized (including carrying boxes as we were still unpacking!). Seriously though, anyone who knows New Balance will know that each year they have different coloured shoes released and I have never owned a black or grey pair. My current bright pink shoes are very comfy and are great for sport, but they don't really look very corporate.
Now it's winter so I thought I would wear my smart (and very comfy), flat black boots to the office. I should mention that we now have wooden floors throughout and my boots were very loud - what was the solution?
My husband and I happened to visit a shopping centre not long after and he steered me towards the PUMA store (I was trying to go into the bookstore opposite!). Let's look for some black pumps were the words that convinced me to leave the bookstore until later (by the way this was the bookstore where I got The Alice Network and then returned to find they also had The Huntress - can't wait for my next trip!).
The first pair I tried on were the Pacer Next and I loved them, but my husband wanted me to continue to look so I tried two other pairs on and returned to the PUMA Pacer Next pair. Now these were actually the men's shoes and they seem to go by the name of PUMA Men's Pacer Next Cage Sneaker in the US. I originally tried the men's on because they were all black and the woman's ones had a white stripe on them, when I put them on they were basically the most comfortable for me.
I do have wider feet than I used to and this could be why the men's style suited me best.
What I found a little strange was that the tongue was sewn in so instead of pushing the tongue up and pulling the sides out to manhandle your foot into it you had to push your foot in and then I hooked the tag on the back with my finger and effectively used it to 'shoehorn' my foot in. It felt weird the first couple of times, but now I do it without thinking.
A very big plus with these shoes is I haven't had a single blister, not even a little rubbing. That's after wearing them for over 8 hours a day four days in a row. They are extremely comfortable and I thoroughly recommend them, in fact I'm not going to even look for a more 'corporate' shoe for work as these blend in nicely with my black trousers and I stay comfortable!
I will still stay loyal to New Balance for my workout shoes, but PUMA is going to be my go to work shoe for quite some time I believe.
Have you tried any of PUMA's sneakers?
