I headed up to VT bright and early today, excitement fueling me more than sleep. The shop my fitter owns isn’t open to the public yet this season, so it’s by appointment only for fittings. This was great because I was the only one there as a customer along with my fitter and a couple employees working on stuff for racer kids who have been coming in already too.
To cut to the chase, we ended up going with the Technica Mach 1 LV Pro W. The shell truly seems to be made for my foot and is a VERY close fit everywhere. A cool feature is a tongue that can be moved fore/aft on the liner which gives me actual contact on my low instep and can still adjust further! It wraps my foot like nothing I’ve had before, maybe a little too much pressure over my nonexistent arch even, which has NEVER happened and felt so good. They are also the tiniest bit shorter than my previous boots so I was worried about that at first, but once I had them on for awhile and using power straps my toes felt good and not crunched. These are truly a low volume boot all around. We still did the usual stretching for me in the forefoot area of course. This was the boot he’d originally had in mind for me, and he was very spot on based on the fit. Nothing else came close to this one for me. We didn’t do a ton to the boot because I need to ski them to see where we need to go, but I am so darn excited to get them on snow and see how they feel! After the shaping for my forefoot they are very snug but feel really good whereas they were quite constricting beforehand. Amazing what a few tweaks can do. Here’s a zoomed in picture of my boots, notice the bump outs inside to accommodate my forefoot area! Those are the spots where I have large bony protrusions on the big toe side. This plastic shows the specific spots much more clearly than any previous boot, very cool to see the boot shaped exactly like this. And that they actually keep the shape. My Langes would tend to try and go back to their original shape with their plastic, so we had to stretch them multiple times when they would shrink back a bit each time, and they still didn’t look this distinct. This is why boots will never fit me out of the box, that protrusion stuck in boots that are pretty straight down the side cause me all sorts of trouble up front.
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Oh, and the reason he wanted me in the 120 flex is because we can soften if needed. He very much disliked how much I was flexing the 105 version and some other boots in that range. I was really unsure how that could be the case given my size, and he thinks it’s my long tibias giving me the leverage versus my height/weight. He also mentioned that he has customers who are much larger in general and cannot flex a boot almost at all and then sometimes has tiny folks who just crush boots. So he doesn’t go by weight/size exclusively in this regard. I’m a little apprehensive about the stiffness to start, but agree that it’s better to start stiffer and adjust as needed than starting at too low of a point. If anyone remembers my feeling like I couldn’t flex my 110 Langes last season, he said the plastic was really tired on it and thinks I flex it just fine and it was more feeling like the output wasn’t as expected with the boot versus not being able to flex it. I guess this could be the case as even taking bolts out didn’t seem to do what I’d hoped yet I did feel like I was bending the boot.. I just wasn’t getting the expected feedback I was looking for. Since I do remember a time where those boots did feel great in that regard, I’m inclined to think it’s as good a hypothesis as any.
I’m just so curious to see how they feel on snow!! I will likely need to go to Big Snow asap!! Unfortunately I have plans the next couple of weeks at least that won’t allow it, but we’ll see after that.
