Not terribly in season, but I figured I’d start posting some of the things I use to make my life easier.

If you have a transmetatarsal, MTP disartic or transphalangeal foot amputation, you know that your friendly prosthetist can make you carbon fiber insoles to restore some stiffness at the front of your shoes and some ability to push off at each step.

But XC skiing with those insoles isn’t really ideal for the following reasons:

  • They’re not stiff enough to withstand a powerful kick without collapsing. And you know what happens when a toe box collapses: the crease in the top of the shoe comes right down onto your tender bits and it’s not pleasant.

  • They have very little resistance to twisting, meaning if you take a tumble and you twist your ankle, the empty toe box and the carbon fiber material inside it will literally wrap around your residual limb - and that hurts like a mofo, trust me on that one.

  • They provide poor side-to-side control if you practice the skating style. They’re okay-ish for traditional style, but you’ll fall more than you want when skating.

  • Last but not least: they’re super expensive. You’ll kick yourself when they break or delaminate at the first bad fall.

So here’s my solution - for NNN bindings anyway, your mileage may vary:

I used an old pair of XC skiing shoes I had lying around, Dremelled away some of the rubber blocks at the bottom of the shoes to create a sort of trough at the center, and installed 15 mm x 6 mm steel stiffening rods under the shoes.

I bent the ends of the rods with the help of a propane torch 15 degrees up at the front to follow the contour of the soles, and also to give the shoes extra stiffness against twisting around the binding.

The rods are held at the very ends of the shoes with two M5 screws, and the front of the rods slip under the NNN binding’s bars too, so they’re not going anywhere. The NNN latch will straddle the 15 mm rod without any problem when clipping in.

My shoes now look like this:

The screws are flathead screws, and they thread into flush spiked nuts (the kind you use to screw things into dry walls) with the spikes ground off, inside the shoes, under the insoles, so nothing protrudes:

Don’t use regular nuts / spacers at the front, even if your level of amputation leaves enough room: you never know what kind of accident you might get into that will ram those protruding metals bits into your feet. You don’t want that.

If you want, you can also pad the empty toe box at the front with PU foam, but I found it unnecessary as the stiffening rods are stiff enough to prevent the front of the shoes from collapsing.

My modified shoes are stiff enough back-to-front that I can kick as hard as I want efficiently, and they’re convincing enough laterally - and refuse to twist enough - that I can skate somewhat well on good snow. It’s still not great on icy or slippery snow, but then it never is when you’re missing toe control anyway :) So I’m not really complaining.

For a nice traditional-style hike in the forest though, they’re fantastic: they make the skis very controllable and I’m much less tired at the end of the hike.

Total cost: around $15 for the 3ft steel rod and the mounting hardware, some propane to run the torch to soften and bend the steel, and 1 hour of my time.

I hope this will inspire you to start enjoying XC skiing once more.